Boy Nobody (3 page)

I listen to the phone for a moment, then I hold it out to the fourth man as if it’s for him. He’s so shocked he doesn’t know what to do.

I shake the phone a little. I look at him like he’s an idiot. We both hear the man shouting over the phone, his voice tinny and distant.

I don’t know what he’s saying, but it doesn’t matter.

AP Bio, Subtopic 3C.

I dangle the phone in front of me.

The guy reaches—

And I hit him in the head, in the soft spot of his right temple, an inch behind his eye. I hit so hard that the phone comes apart in my hand.

He drops to the ground.

Done.

What if the phone didn’t ring? What would have happened?

Not now. I can’t think about that now.

“Chance can be your friend or your enemy,” Mother used to say. “Make it a friend.”

Mother, that’s what I call the woman who trained me.

She’d taught me this lesson, and I applied it today.

I look at the bodies of the four men on the ground around me. I look at the gun by my feet.

Mother taught me another lesson. Death is a tool I use for my work. It’s not something I do lightly. I could finish these men, but it is not strictly necessary. They are already crippled, their mission thwarted.

They do not need to die. At least not now.

Issue closed.

It’s time to use a real phone. My iPhone.

It looks like a normal phone, but it’s not. The physical architecture is the same, but the operating system is much different. And the apps? Well, they’re far from average.

I open the Weather Channel app. I click on
REPORT HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS
.

I hold up the phone. A map appears with a GPS dot that shows my position. It glows red, then a second later flashes green.

A cleanup crew will be here shortly.

Mother will not be happy. I might have some explaining to do.

I take the car keys from the fourth man’s pocket. I start up the sedan. It’s not like Chinese spies are going to report a stolen car.

Besides, it’s got diplomatic plates. And I like to drive fast.

I’d never do it under normal circumstances. Nothing to draw attention to myself.

But diplomatic plates and driving like an asshole go hand in hand. Besides, I’m on the Pike, where traffic laws are optional.

I’m heading toward Boston now, putting distance between myself and the incident. The mile markers tick by, each one making me safer than the last.

I glance in my rearview, automatically scanning for tails. I open the sunroof so I can monitor the sky.

I’m alone.

I briefly think of Jack, what it’s like for him right now. In a split second he’s become a sad statistic. His father’s death will be a minor tragedy among the privileged students at Natick Prep. A young man, the unexpected loss of a parent, a period of mourning, a period of adjustment.

But I know something Jack doesn’t know:

Life goes on.

Even after the worst of tragedies, it just keeps going.

I am sixteen, but this is an old lesson to me. It helps me do what I must do.

There is something else I know:

Jack’s father was not who he seemed to be.

Jack thought of his father as the CEO of a tech firm with high-level government contracts.

That much was true.

But his father was something else, too. He was secretly working with the wrong people. After dancing with four Chinese spies this afternoon, I’m guessing it was the Chinese government.

The details are not for me to know. They are not my business.

My business is to get in, do the job, and get out again. Move on to the next.

The job is assigned to me.

I don’t have to think. I have to act.

The general picture, that’s all I need, and the true picture of Jack’s father is that he was doing something he was not supposed to be doing. Something that made him dangerous, possibly even a traitor.

That’s why I was sent here. To stop him.

It’s my specialty. I get an assignment, and I carry it out.

The Program, the organization I work for, says I am a patriot, but patriots have a choice. I do not.

Maybe that’s not true.

I had a choice a long time ago, and I made a mistake.

My father had a choice, too. He chose wrong, or I wouldn’t be here.

Back to Jack and his father. The matter at hand.

I don’t need to have an opinion about what I’ve done, but I do have a way of thinking about it that helps me.

I’ve done Jack a favor.

He doesn’t know the damage his father has already done or the damage he was yet to do if he were not stopped.

Unlike me, Jack’s cherished image of his father will be maintained forever, frozen in time. Who and what his father was will never be known. Not to him. Not to anyone.

Here’s what Jack will remember:

The beautiful lie that defined his family.

I am not lucky like Jack.

I know the truth about my family. Or some of it.

I know my father was not the great dad I thought he was, or the man he pretended to be to the world. The Program tells me one thing, but my memories tell me another.

I don’t know which to believe.

It’s enough to make all my memories suspect, to make the past a mystery from which I cannot escape.

I was twelve years old.

I was waiting for my father in his office at the university, and I got a call. There had been an accident, and I had to come home immediately. That’s what the caller said.

I ran home to find Mike sitting at our kitchen table. I was surprised to see him there.

“Where are my parents?” I said.

There were cookies on a plate in the middle of the table. Oatmeal raisin. Mom used to put them out for us. I was skinny and hardly ate. Mike was big for his age and ate a lot.

“Your parents,” Mike said. “I need to talk to you about them.”

I noticed a can of diet ginger ale on the floor by the refrigerator. It had spilled and formed a sticky brown-yellow puddle. I was looking at it, wondering how it got there, wondering why nobody
had done anything about it, when Mike reached out and touched me with something.

Something sharp, like a thumbtack.

I suddenly felt tired.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said to me.

“Why would I be afraid?” I said.

My head started to spin, and I fell. Mike steadied me. He propped me against his shoulder and led me into the living room. A friend helping another friend in distress.

My father was sitting on a chair in the living room, his head slumped in front of him, his legs duct-taped to the legs of the chair.

“That’s funny,” I said.

When you see something absurd, something that is beyond your power to comprehend, your mind interprets it as a joke. It is a natural human defense mechanism. I’ve used it to my advantage many times.

I didn’t know things like that back then. I was young and stupid. I thought we were playing a game.

“It is funny,” Mike said. “Funny and sad.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Mike snapped his fingers hard. Once, twice.

My dad’s head shot up. He could not speak. There was tape over his mouth.

“Dad,” I said.

His eyes told the story.

This was no game. It was danger.

Mike grabbed the back of my collar, pulled me close to my father, so close we were almost touching.

“Do you see?” Mike said.

But he wasn’t talking to me.

I was only twelve, but I understood. I might not have been able to put it into words at the time, but I got the idea.

Mike hadn’t brought me to the living room to show me what he’d done to my father; he’d brought me there to show my father what he was going to do to me.

“This is not your son,” Mike told my father. “Not anymore.”

I tried to reach out to my father, but Mike pulled me away.

I was more than tired then. I was falling asleep on my feet.

“Who are you?” I said to Mike.

“I’m your friend,” he said. “I’m Mike.”

“You’re not my friend,” I said.

“You’re a smart kid,” he said.

The way he’d said it, it was like he wasn’t a kid. He was something else, something I didn’t yet know existed.

He led me outside. I had no ability to resist. He put me in the back of a waiting cab. It looked like a cab, but the windows were blacked out.

That was the last time I saw either of my parents.

It was the end of everything.

It was the beginning of everything else.

I look out the window as mile markers pass in a blur. Buildings in a blur. Faces in a blur. I learned long ago that the world is blurred by speed. The greater the speed, the more the blur.

If I keep moving forward, it will stay that way.

The thought makes me breathe easier.

When I’m ten miles away from the primary zone, I see the Dunkin’ Donuts up ahead.

I pull into the big parking lot, and I leave the sedan in a far corner. It’s a beast. I hate to see it go.

I switch to the car that’s waiting for me here. A Camry, complete with a scratched rear bumper and dented hubcaps. Designed to blend. Boring. Slow.

I take out my iPhone. I slide the bar to the left, up, then quickly down and up on the diagonal. It’s a custom gesture that puts the phone in secure mode.

I open the Games folder, click on the Poker app. Click
NEW GAME
.

The cards shuffle.

I arrange a hand of ten cards, a phone number’s worth, and I click
DEAL
.

The computer opens a connection to an anonymous server. My voice is converted to a digital signal, chopped up into packets, sent across the Web, and reassembled.

A complex process that takes no more than a second.

One beep tone, and a woman answers.

“Hello, Mom,” I say.

That’s what I call this woman. Mother. The woman who is in charge of everything. Father runs my assignments. Mother oversees.

Mother and Father. That’s how I refer to the people who manage me. We do it for security purposes. If for some reason our secure line were breached, you’d hear nothing but a mother talking to her son.

Her son.

That’s what she calls me.

“Sweetheart,” the voice on the phone says. She sounds like a person who’s happy to get my call. “I heard about the game from your father.”

“Then you know I won,” I say.

“I do.”

“But there were—complications. Afterward, I mean.”

Silence.

“Four troublemakers,” I say. “Unexpected.”

“To you. Not to me.”

I’m glad she knew about the Chinese spies but troubled by the fact that I didn’t. Could I have missed something?

“Can you tell me anything else about who they were?” I say. “It might help me do a better job next time.”

“I was told they were spectators at the game, and they wandered onto the field. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“So there’s nothing to worry about?”

“Nothing at all,” Mother says.

“I’m relieved,” I say.

Traffic zooms by on the Pike. I look across the road at a giant billboard. A smiling family sits at a kitchen table eating dinner.

Home is where the
is.

That’s what the sign says. The heart has steam wafting from the top.

It makes no sense to me.

I study it for a moment, trying to understand the meaning.

“You won your game,” Mother says. “That’s what matters. Your father and I are very proud of you.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

Proud.

It’s nice to hear. It means I’ve done my job well, completed another assignment. I was even able to adjust to unforeseen circumstances at the end.

I’m good at what I do, and I’m appreciated for it. So why is there a question nagging at me?

When does it end?

That’s what I want to know.

My life is one continual assignment. I move from world to world as I’ve been trained to do, leaving nothing but bodies behind me. With each assignment comes new challenges, new complications, new excitement.

You have a gift.
That’s what Mother once told me. She said she saw it in me the first day we met.

I’m lucky that way. How many sixteen-year-olds know who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing in the world?

Yet with all I know and all I’ve been taught, still the question comes:

When does it end?

I think about promises that were made. The lies I was told.

No
, I correct myself. Not lies.

Promises that I misunderstood.

I was young then. How could I have known?

I do not remember the ride.

Mike had drugged me. Drugged me but not killed me. He could have done either. I know that now. It was simply a matter of which syringe he chose. One click is death. Two clicks is temporary coma.