Generation of Liars (20 page)

“What the hell do you think you’re
doing?” he asked.

“This,” I said, balling up the
repugnant tie in my hands and forming it into a lumpy sphere. A hard swallow
trickled down his throat, nudging his Adam’s apple under his skin. I shoved the
tie into his mouth. He gurgled as his face turned a concerning shade of blue,
and I eased up, letting the spit-soaked tie fall to the floor.

I turned around and checked my
reflection in the shiny gold elevator doors and ran my hands over my skirt to
smooth the puckers. The elevator doors parted open and I gave the man, crouched
and shaking, one last warning look before I walked out into the lobby.

“You bitch.” The words were hissed
as the doors snapped shut behind me.

The lobby was buzzing with
employees slowly making entrance back to their desks following the fire drill.
Shoulder Pads was crossing the lobby with a troop of equally horrifically
dressed coworkers. I shrunk my posture and hoped she wouldn’t notice me.

“Hey you! Yoo-hoo.” Too late. She
had caught me. “Are you leaving already?”

“Yeah,” I called back. “I just
don’t think office life is for me. Too dull.”

“A shame. I was just breaking
ground on a customized desk calendar for you. It was going to have cats on it.
I was going to ask you if you preferred Siamese or Calicos.”

“I’m not much of a cat person,” I
replied before spinning around and making a run for the front exit. It was
still drizzling outside and the fog from the rain robed the streets in a
charcoal haze.

The black rental car pulled up
alongside me. The window rolled down, revealing a set of beady tawny eyes that
roved beneath honeyed lashes. “Get in,” Rabbit said.

I climbed inside the car and gave
Rabbit an ear to ear smile. “Mission accomplished.” I noticed that Rabbit had a
pissy look on his face. “Who fragged your hard drive?”

“Alice, I just saw Pressley Connard
book down Avenue of the Americas on foot. He was holding a bunch of empty acid
cans.”

“Oh,” I said. A grunt of fake
surprise was made.

“Did you see him inside Cibix?”

“Nope.” I wasn’t going to fess up
to being in close proximity of Connard twice in one week. “But I definitely saw
blondie again. How does she do it? It’s like she has ESP hidden inside that big
hair of hers.”

“I can’t believe she got us again.”
Rabbit slammed his fist into the eye of the steering wheel. “I wonder who she
works for. These jobs are getting pretty crowded between the mystery blonde and
Connard.”

“Well, I know for certain that she
doesn’t work for the government.”

“What makes you sure?”

“She wanted those servers cooked as
badly as we did.”

Rabbit flicked on the windshield
wipers and scanned his mirrors. “I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news
for us.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter today.
Today, I smoked the servers with nary a setback.” I undid the buttons on my
blazer and tussled my hair. “So I’m calling it a victory.”

“The area’s hot, let’s get back to
the Hilton and lay low.” He glided the car into the city’s late-morning
traffic. “Lucky for us, Cibix will want a low profile on this.”

“You don’t think Cibix is going to
initiate an all-out manhunt for the perp who creamed their servers?”

“Unlikely, since Cibix kept the
fact that they were working on Project Nine a secret. The last thing they
wanted was to spark a war between their competitors to rush development on
their own recovery systems to pitch to the government. The also kept the
information exclusively on those servers instead of cloud storage, in order to
prevent leakage. This attack won’t be reported to the police, it will go
directly to Homeland Security. It will never make the news.”

Chapter Fourteen: Homecoming

M
Y
THUMB BRUSHED over the mounded buttons, tracing the contours of the ordered
labyrinth they spread into, touching the shiny plastic surface, which was the
same cosmically black shade as infinite galaxies.

“Rabbit?” I called out.

“What is it now, Alice?”

“Why do you think hotels glue the
remote control to the night table?”

“It’s so nobody steals it.”

“My gosh,” I said, making my
fingers dance away from the buttons, “what has the world come to?”

Rabbit’s head poked out from the
bathroom door. “Alice, you of all people shouldn’t have to ask that.”

I flicked the television on, just
in case Rabbit was wrong about the incident at Cibix not making the news. “I
know, I guess I was just kind of hoping the real world wasn’t quite as
subversive as our little world.” I shrugged myself free from the stuffy black
blazer.

“Anything on the television about
us?” Rabbit called out over the sound of the toilet flushing as he emerged from
the bathroom.

“No news on the happenings at
Cibix, but the weather girl is warning about a lightning storm headed for New
York City this afternoon.”

Rabbit plopped down next to me on
the edge of the bed and we both watched as the camera panned to the news desk,
where the anchor announced that due to the storm all flights out of JFK and
surrounding airports were grounded until further notice.

“That sucks,” Rabbit said.

“So much for a speedy getaway,” I
said.

Rabbit got up from the bed and
powered on his laptop. I shut off the television and laid my head on the
pillow, listening to the dripping rain tapping against the storm gutter outside
our window. When I closed my eyes all I could picture was Pressley standing
inside the server room at Cibix. I felt guilty about the way I had hurt his
arm. He had looked good, and I told myself that it should be a crime to hurt
someone who looked that good. Except that Pressley was a government agent, so
technically it was.

I could hear the rain outside
picking up, battering against the exterior walls of the hotel. Dreary rainy
days had always made me homesick in Paris. But now I was homesick and I was in
America, close to home.

“Rabbit?

“Yup, Alice?”

“Since no flights are leaving New
York, at least until late tonight, do you mind if I borrow the car?”

He pushed out a sigh. “What do you
need the car for?”

“I want to go out and get some
stuff to fix my hair. This blue looks cheap, and you know I don’t handle cheap
well.”

“Can’t you just walk to a drugstore
from here?”

“Where do I start with all the
things wrong with that question? First, I do not put drugstore dye in my hair.”
That was a lie, because ever since that first day I met Motley and he brought
me to the Rite Aid inside Grand Central, I had exclusively put drugstore dye in
my hair. “Second of all, I’m not travelling around New York City on foot in
broad daylight to be spotted by any Cibix employee who saw me today.” I hoped
Rabbit couldn’t tell from the weakness in my voice that what I really planned
to do with the car was far more risky.

“But, you don’t even drive. I’ve
known you three years and I’ve never seen you drive once. You said it was
against your policy.”

“You’re right, Rabbit, I don’t
drive. But I know how. And today I choose to. Policy change is officially in
effect. Deal with it.”

“Fine, Alice, do whatever you want.
Just get out of my hair and be careful out there.”

He pitched the car key to me and I
raced outside with it. I whirled through the hotel’s turnstiles and into the
raw weather. The rain was coming down at a slant, and it had managed to pour
onto the floor of the parking garage so that the rental car was sitting in a
small puddle. I slid in behind the wheel and turned on the car’s defogger. I
relaxed into the driver’s seat and lit up a cigarette while I waited for the
glass to clear. I used my heel to kick out the front seat’s middle console and
pull up a tangle of wires. I knew Motley would have made sure the rental car
was outfitted with GPS system to track us. I finished pulling out the GPS,
tossed it out the car window into the puddle, and gunned it out of the parking
garage.

*   
*    *

Sitting behind the wheel of a car
felt strange, since I hadn’t driven in three years. I went slowly at first, but
I was up at ninety miles per hour by the time I merged onto the Tappan Zee
Bridge. I fiddled with the radio dial until I landed on a good station and
melted into the driver's seat as I glided down Interstate 95 straight into
Connecticut. The rain coming down all around me felt like an artillery of heavy
bullets pelting the car.

When I turned off at the exit for
Fairfield, Connecticut, forty-five minutes later, I was glad I had been smart
enough to rip out the GPS. Motley had no idea that I grew up in Connecticut,
and I intended to keep it that way. I had always told Motley that I grew up in
some Midwestern town, and I had told Ben the same lie at the coffee shop when
he asked. Somehow people asked less questions when you told them you were
fleeing the cow poke. Connecticut was the place where my life had begun
twenty-one years ago, and the place where Heather Gilmore’s life had ended
three years ago.

I took a right off the exit and
pulled my gold aviator sunglasses from my bag and pushed them up on my face. I
came into the center of town and scanned around, remarking the sameness from
when I left, but also the subtle changes. I scooted past the town green, which
appeared solidified in time; a banner heralding the upcoming Friday night
football game stretched over the gazebo. I took everything in. My old high
school, Berto’s grocery, the post office, they were all still there just like I
left them. It felt surreal as I took the once-familiar route to my parent’s house.
There was a deep, misty fog that seemed determined to blot out my memory of the
route, but I knew the way, trudging the nearly deserted roads enveloped in that
hefty, disorienting fog.

I pulled onto Francis Terrace,
snaking down it slowly and purposefully, as though the road was opening up
before me as a ladder to an enchanted kingdom. Francis Terrace was situated in
an upper-middle-class neighborhood with mostly big colonials featuring
protracted front porches and bright chandeliers in the windows. Not much had
changed in three years, but I noticed the changes, the little ones that nobody
would blink at unless this was home. The For Sale signs, the green house that
had been repainted white, the barren flower garden in my parent’s front yard
that had once been flourishing.

Andy Warhol once said something
about people forgetting what emotions were supposed to be at some point in the
1960’s, and he didn’t think they ever remembered. Growing up, I always told
myself they probably all moved to neighborhoods like this and got amnesia. My
parent’s house was almost at the end of Francis Terrace, a Tudor-style house
with a garage attached by a breezeway and not much growing in the yard. I
trolled by the house slowly as hot tears boiled in my eyes. Aside from the lack
of my mother’s flowers, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it from the
last time I had laid eyes on it.

I steadied the car to a stop and
lifted the parking brake so I could light up a cigarette. A violent wind gust
made the house’s clapboard siding applaud in the breeze. Peering at the house,
I could see the television in the living room fuzzing through the window. I
could make out the outline of the giant brick fireplace, and I wondered if my
picture was still on the mantle. Were my old swimming medals still on my
bedroom wall? Was my little sister Maribeth’s high school diploma framed in a
gold box like mind had been? My eyes scanned upwards to the second level and I
noticed that beyond my old bedroom window everything was dark. I blotted my leaking
eyes and let the flame from my Zippo race over the tip of the cigarette
dangling from my lips.

Then lightning struck.

Without a warning, a portion of the
overhead sky crackled into an explosion of light. A bold brightness of
aurora-caliber splendor filled up the expanse around me, spooking me enough to
drop my cigarette and let it roll under the brake pedal as I gunned the gas. My
stunned heart pounded in my chest. When I hit the turn onto the main road, I
was shaking and sobbing with my white knuckles clenched around the steering
wheel.

“This isn’t my home anymore,” I
said, tasting a stream of hot salty tears mixing with the words. “Home doesn’t
exist for me anymore, and it sure as hell doesn’t exist for Heather Gilmore.”
There was that name again, never far, always chasing me, even on deserted
streets.

Chapter Fifteen: The Rails

T
HE
DRIVE BACK to the city was mostly a blur. I got off the exit for Manhattan just
as the thick of the storm seemed to have passed. Even though the clouds were
slowly opening up to reveal a new sapphire sky, stubborn herds of clouds still
dropped wild rain that pounded the streets. The roads leading back to the
Hilton were saturated to curb level from having taken in the buckets of rain
dumped by the storm. The impatient driver on my tail had me going faster than I
liked. I took a deep breath and let my muscles untwist as my fingers fiddled
with the dial on the radio.

I heard a loud
thunk
and the
car shook in such a way that I felt taken out of time. Once my wits had restored,
I realized the car had struck the curb and taken out a city mailbox. I pressed
on the gas, but the car only grunted. I got out of the car and saw that the
front headlight was gouged out, and a metal pipe, which looked to be of
importance, was hanging from the car’s undercarriage. The front of the vehicle
was a crushed bumper of smoking tin and there was no way it was going to start
up.

I walked a city block in the
pounding rain until I hit a subway station to crawl into. I decided that I
wasn’t going to call Rabbit. I would get back to the Hilton on my own. As I
disappeared down into the subway, I noted sloppy graffiti bleeding down the
walls, with the words
, Never
Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero
. I skimmed the train schedule, bought
a ticket, and hopped aboard a train that would take me back towards the hotel.
I eased into my seat and thought that I blended in well. As far as the big
apple was concerned, I was just another punkish twenty-something with a wild
streak and a streak of blue in my hair. There were thousands like me all over
New York. I checked the time on my phone and estimated that I had probably
fifteen minutes to kill until my stop, so I pulled out my phone and dialed the
number of the hospital in Paris. The receptionist picked up and I asked her to
page Ben.