Nine-Tenths (21 page)

“And I?” He pushed the door open and gestured for her to take the lead.

“You were as detached as always. I didn’t know how to read your emotions. I suppose the lack of gushing adoration could have been a sign of resistance.”

Leonard chuckled and took her hand. She sighed and leaned into his side as they emerged in the fresh night air.

“Let’s try and get some sleep, Frankenstein,” she said, mildly amused.

“That sounds like a great idea.”

Chapter Eighteen

Walking through the corridors of the DID the following morning, Leonard moved as if on autopilot — swiping his card, leaning in for retina scans, and punching in his five-digit code. He barely even noticed the three-story portrait, which he now knew to be President Stehlen.

McGinnis had aborted any attempts to chat with him after being met with aloofness from the get-go. This suited Leonard perfectly well. He was not in the mood. Distracted by images of Alina and Max, Leonard sulked defiantly.

Jealous of his wife’s chummy relationship with Max and angry with himself for his own naïveté, Leonard marched along, oblivious to his surroundings. Fatigued, confused, and irritated, Leonard didn’t know where his emotions ended and reality began. He considered the possibility that Alina was having an affair with Max, but dismissed the idea. After all, when would she have time? Then again, when did she find the time to do all the things she claimed to have done in preparation for the escape to Grand Junction? Leonard shook the thoughts from his mind, concluding that exhaustion had severely impaired his judgment.

When he reached the hanger, he did not pause. The enormous facility filled with satellites failed to impress him. Old news. He had been there hundreds of times before. Perhaps Alina was right. Maybe he
was
the victim of a DID experiment gone awry.

Absentmindedly weaving his way through the cubicle maze, Leonard attempted to focus on the day’s important plans. He needed to double check that Dickens also took lunch at noon. In addition, he had to find a plausible excuse to stay at his desk while his coworkers enjoyed the DID’s delectable sandwich selections.

He passed Sandy Little’s cubicle and nodded casually. Anything but casual, the young woman’s blue eyes pierced his, causing him to stop in his tracks. They locked gazes, neither saying a word.

Sandy.

Through no fault of nature or choice, Sandy Little lost her baby yesterday afternoon at the hands of the Department of Health. In pursuit of some God-forsaken new world order called The New Direction, women like Sandy Little, an L-2 perhaps, were not permitted to bear children. The details of Alina’s confession flooded Leonard’s brain. Images of Sandy screaming and protesting formed in his mind, but he had no consoling words to offer his assistant. The lingering silence suffocated Leonard’s spirit. Only yesterday, this girl had oscillated from chatty to professional in the blink of an eye. This morning, nothing.

Leonard could not decipher the expression behind Sandy Little’s cold eyes. It wasn’t anger. Not even sadness. No distinguishable emotion whatsoever. It was as if her soul had been extinguished. Numb and lethargic, the young woman merely stared.

Does she know Dr. Marsh is my wife?

Leonard broke her gaze and swiftly departed, feeling a bit woozy as he approached his cubicle.

At least an hour passed before Leonard realized that he had been aimlessly flipping from one page to another, perusing the branches of the SSP01 tree without actually absorbing any information. Staring at the Priority Target profile of Stewart Shinskey, aka Alina’s Max, Leonard sat forward.

How do I print this?
Contemplating the possibilities, Leonard concluded that he would have to download the information on a disk if he could find one. Whether or not he could smuggle it out of the facility remained to be seen, but he had not been frisked or x-rayed when he left yesterday. Leonard rummaged through his drawers. Near the back of the top drawer he found a black thumb drive.
Perfect.

As he pulled out the thumb drive, his hands passed over a small, tightly folded scrap of yellow paper. Curious, he smoothed it out on his desk. It was a note written in curly handwriting followed by the signature
Sandy
.

Oh my God,
he thought.
Am
I
having an affair?

“Dear Mr. Tramer,”
the note began.

Too professional.
He sighed in relief and continued to read.

“It has been an honor to work with you. I know there are many among us who seek to thwart the evil intentions of this government. I often wonder if you are a member of that quiet resistance. With that in mind, I have tried to be a faithful employee. I pray that my efforts have been of use to you. Sometimes I believe that we will prevail. That belief used to inspire me to struggle through another day. However, I find no comfort in anything any longer.

“I need to leave these words behind, even though I know they will go no further than your eyes. I, Sandy Little, give my allegiance to those who seek to rebuild the free world…and no one else.”

“I need to leave these words behind,” Leonard muttered under his breath. “What the—?”

Leonard leapt from his chair and raced through the cubicle maze, nearly knocking down one of his subordinates in the process. Upon reaching Ms. Little’s cubicle, Leonard shouted, “Sandy!”

Slumped over her keyboard, Sandy appeared to be taking a morning snooze.

“Sandy,” Leonard repeated, out of breath. He touched her on the shoulder gently. Nothing. A little harder. Still nothing. He swung her chair around.

The beautiful blond woman’s head lolled over to one side. Her arm slipped from her lap, knocking down a prescription bottle. Leonard watched it fall, seemingly in slow motion, bouncing twice before rolling into the corner. Touching her neck and wrists, Leonard searched for a pulse, not entirely sure if he knew how to find one.

“Medic,” he yelled, his voice rough and unsure.

Leonard moved his eyes from the lifeless woman’s face to a note lying on her keyboard.

YOU THINK WE’RE STUPID!

He gazed at the note, the last words of a woman pushed past the point of no return.

Several paramedics rushed though the cubicle maze. Entering Sandy’s workspace the EMTs quickly checked her vitals. “No pulse,” one man said while another attempted to usher Leonard from the area. One paramedic started CPR. Eventually, Leonard capitulated and staggered back to his own cubicle.

As the morning dragged on, images of Sandy’s head rolling back zoomed to the forefront of Leonard’s mind every time he tried to focus on something else. He wished he could call Alina, but even if he felt it safe to share, which he did not, what good would it do? It wouldn’t bring Sandy back. It wouldn’t comfort Alina, and it might even distract her from their important lunchtime experiment. No. The idea was foolish. For now, the anguish of Sandy’s pointless death was his alone to bear.

The mood among his coworkers seemed to follow a similar roller coaster pattern. For the first hour, panic and shock electrified the air. Slowly, as people stopped talking and returned to their desks, a somber atmosphere of gloom settled on the Stasi crew. It was unusually quiet, although fingers clanked sharply on keyboards in an otherwise eerie pocket of stillness.

After confirming that Dickens’ lunch hour was also at noon, Leonard spent ten minutes methodically tearing Sandy’s yellow note into tiny, unrecoverable bits. He hated to destroy it, because her words soothed his spirit.
The-Leonard-that-came-before
might not have been such a conformist asshole after all. Sandy had picked up on something. Eventually, Leonard allowed himself to be comforted by that notion.

Glancing at his watch for the nineteenth time, Leonard was pleased to see the numbers 11:43. Seventeen minutes until lunch. In about ten, his coworkers would become restless and move around in their cubicles anticipating the break. As the clock ticked slowly toward noon, the somber atmosphere lightened somewhat. Folks were eager to get out of the stuffy hanger and make their way to the corridors where the atmosphere was less dreary.

Leonard decided to simply stay put, allow the others to file out past him, and act as if he was just finishing up. McGinnis was already miffed, so he probably wouldn’t stop by to check on him. At five minutes to twelve, as predicted, Stasi project employees made their way to the elevators. Leonard remained in his seat, arranging papers and desktop supplies — his stapler, tape dispenser, and various-sized sticky note tablets. The room had nearly cleared out by 11:59. Leonard quickly logged onto Dickens’ computer. He double-checked Max’s WLN record and found that it was far more extensive than his
Priority Target
summary. It contained pages of notes — very specific notations about grocery and errand trips; number of hours inside and outside of the home; intimate details Leonard refused to read for fear that Alina’s name might appear among them. Max was being monitored day and night. The notes spanned a little over a year.

“Shit,” Leonard whispered as he fumbled for the thumb drive and downloaded the detailed information.

Then he headed over to WLN02 and looked up Alina Marsh-Tramer. The red tracking button ominously appeared on the screen. Leonard was just about to click the mouse when a gruff voice behind him caught him entirely by surprise.

“Lunch, Tramer.”

Leonard quickly switched off his monitor and swiveled to face the intruder.
The dowdy break enforcer.
“I’m staying at my desk,” he said coolly.

“Sorry, but that’s not allowed.”

Leonard leapt from his chair and shot across the cubicle. “Not allowed?” he screamed inches from her face. “Not allowed? Who are you to tell me I’m not allowed to eat at my desk?”

Alarmed, the woman took a step back. Then she scowled and repeated, “It’s not allowed. Let’s go.”

Worked up in a frenzy, Leonard screeched like an animal, “I’ll be damned if you’re going tell me when and where I can eat my lunch.”

She smirked. “Well, be damned then.”

“Fuck you.”

The woman glowered, refusing to give ground.

“My assistant committed suicide this morning. Suicide! I found her dead body, slumped there in her chair, and I sure as fucking hell am not going to spend the next half-hour in the presence of vapid people munching on stale sandwiches. I’m staying. At. My. Desk. Are we clear?”

Flustered, the woman stepped back. Her jaw dropped. Clearly, she never had to deal with the
my assistant committed suicide
situation in the past. In addition, she did not appear to have read about such a scenario in her union handbook. Rather than continue along this dangerous road with Leonard, the woman decided to retreat, pivoting abruptly and disappearing from view.

Leonard took a deep breath and returned to his seat. 12:04 p.m.

He turned his monitor back on and hit Alina’s tracking button. A map of the hospital district popped up on the screen. A small red dot pulsed in the middle of a building just south of Children’s Hospital.

The Neil Nelson Medical Center had been the newest and finest private hospital in Colorado…before the Feds took it over and turned it into the dysfunctional operation Alina had described to him.

Leonard tapped his finger on the desk waiting for something to happen. He moved his mouse around absentmindedly. As the stationary dot continued to pulse, Leonard noticed something he had missed the first time he visited the tracking system. In the bottom right corner, the outline of a battery appeared to be nearly full.

A minute later the dot slowly moved north. Leonard’s heart raced. He felt almost joyful. Here was his beloved wife reduced to a pulsing dot on a map, and all he could do was smile. Life. Death. Possibility. It all came together in this moment…watching his wife’s dot amble north making its way toward Fitzsimmons Drive.

As promised the dot stopped in the northwest corner of Fitzsimmons and Seventeenth where several roads merged in front of the Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center. Presumably Alina was stashing her ID pass in a safe place.

Leonard held his breath. The dot remained in the same place. Fifteen seconds. Thirty. Sixty. Two minutes. Leonard had to suppress a shout of joy as he pushed his chair away from the desk and spun three times. He looked at his watch and examined the screen again. Nearly three minutes.

“Yes,” he said, clenching one fist and pulling it into his chest.

All the emotions of the previous two days — thoughts he pushed down, fears he refused to face, passions he dared not pursue — they all scrambled to emerge as a wave of relief overcame Leonard. He confronted images of Sandy’s lifeless form, a girl lost before her time. Anger, shock, and sadness colored the morning, but now Leonard had hope. Tears formed at the edges of his eyes.

The experiment proved what they suspected, what they dreamed. The tracking transmitters were in their ID passes. Thankfully, Max was creating new identities for them. Clean IDs with no chips. The Tramers
would
escape and make a new life for themselves in Grand Junction — a free society that the Stasi Satellites and the Watcher Listening Network could not infiltrate. Leonard spun around in his chair once more.

As he settled back at his desk, the most dreadful thing confronted his eyes.

No.

The dot was moving. North. He zoomed in. Weaving in and around the walking paths at the Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, the dot gained ground at an admirable speed. Alina was walking. And the WLN was following her every step.

It confirmed the possibility that he deeply feared, but dare not voice. The transmitter was not in her ID pass.

It was in Alina.

Chapter Nineteen

For the duration of the lunch hour, Leonard exhausted his brain trying to hack into the tracking software. He had hoped to find a way to disable the tracking links to Alina, himself, and Natalia. Unless someone was looking, he reasoned, they wouldn’t notice an inoperative tracking number. Nevertheless, his efforts were in vain.