The Rise and Falling Out of Saint Leslie of Security (15 page)

"Now we're getting somewhere,” Dr. Hamen said, smiling.

Looking swollen and inflamed, the red sun crested over the hills, burning off the pools of mist hanging over the shadowed forest. Everett gripped the sweaty steering wheel of his lift car with one hand while he rubbed his eyes with the other and yawned. He squinted in the morning sun and looked at himself in the rearview mirror, at his disheveled thinning hair, dyed bright red to conceal more white than he cared to admit. Staying awake all night had deepened the lines splintering around his eyes and harrowing his forehead. Half his face looked back at him in the glass. His eye was blood shot, the iris, usually a dull green, seemed to have fragmented into flecks of amber, gold and emerald, with a central pinpoint of jet black. His thin lips trembled. He couldn't wait to land at the North Creek Atheist cell in Vermont, swallow some vitamins and collapse into his bed.

Just a little further to go. I am definitely getting too old for this shit.

But then, this once, it was worth it. Even if he had to take orders from these stupid Atheists.

The United Sons of Adam. Everett always laughed when American media refused to use that name—official White House sources referred to them as the Sons of Man, so the SOM they were. Everett had joined them out of necessity. Of all the groups organizing against Washington, the USA had proven the most troublesome.

Everett shrugged.
What were my options?
he asked his half face in the mirror.
I never would've been accepted into the Nation of Islam, and if I had I would've ended up killing one of those dirty black bastards. And while I'd much rather be a member of the Neo-Green Mountain Boys, they simply haven't captured the fears and imagination of the Americans the way the Atheists have
.

Still, Everett hated the arrogance every one of these Atheists possessed. They looked at him with a certain disdain and condescension. But no matter how much they looked down on him, they needed him.

And they know it—they know how much they need me. In spite of the fact they know I'm secretly a very religious man. I've brought a whole new level of effectiveness to their organization. Could they have pulled off an assassination attempt before I got involved?

Media coverage in the United States is up eighty-seven percent since I joined the movement. Eighty-seven percent! Even though some of the stodgy old men in charge have balked at a higher level of violence, they know if they want to get any closer to their ultimate goal, to overthrow the powers in Washington, they need a bad mother-fucker like me. Whether I believe in God or not.

The USA leaders were all very aware of Everett's religious background. He proudly considered himself one of the great Truth Seekers of his time, and a seeker of truth lived his life carefully, exposing enlightenment right at the very edge of a society's accepted norms and practices. It was like ripping off a callus, peeling back an epidermal layer toward discovery. A Truth Seeker experimented with spiritual ideas.

During the course of Everett's life, he'd become associated with many different groups. As a young man he had considered himself a Born Again Christian. He'd rolled around in spiritual ecstasy on the church floor with the best of them. He had been healed in faith a couple of times—once for migraines and once for a kind of depression that had sapped him of so much energy he could barely walk—and he'd found his Holy Spirit voice and spoken in tongues. His spirit language had sounded like a cross between Latin and some kind of suburbanized Ebonics.

After that he'd been involved with the Past Lifers, a group he discovered in Albany, who believed human problems originated primarily from a lost or dulled ability to recall the lessons of past lives. Everett learned a great deal during those three years, even though his falling out with the church's leadership led to his expulsion from the group.

Everett grew so enlightened in those days, he began to see the identities of past lives in the people around him. When he recognized the hidden spirit of the infamous Jim Jones in his pastor, he felt obligated to warn his fellow parishioners. The pastor, of course, tried to deny this aspect of his past lives, and gave Everett the choice of confessing he'd made a mistake, or leaving the church. Everett could not confess such a lie in good conscience and denounced the pastor and his church.

Still, the lessons of the visions he experienced back then stayed with him to this day. He could recognize the hand of certain past personalities in his thoughts and behavior, an ability he found quite useful and liberating.

There were times he suffered overwhelming grief and remorse over some ... things he had done ... to his daughter, and to the little girl's mother. Granted, they had damn well deserved their respective punishments. They possessed wanton, lewd spirits. But in punishing them, Everett often lost control. Something or someone else would take over. Now he knew it wasn't himself at all, but the remnant spirit of the legendary Saddam Hussein. Everett wasn't responsible.

"Of course, I can't discuss such points of religion with the Atheists,” Everett said out loud, looking up again at his half face.

They thought they were better than him, they humored him, made grand allowances for his ignorance. But they had something Everett needed—the ability to strike forcefully at Washington. For that he was willing to shut his mouth and take a few of their orders. Smile at their self-congratulating humanist bullshit.

He was willing to do this, to put up with this quiet humiliation, for one reason. As much as he hated the Atheists, he hated his brother more. He hated Father Washington more than anything in this world. This was why he'd gone through the motions of renouncing belief in God to join the Atheists. Everyone knew that was just a formality anyway.

"Father Washington.” Everett snickered. “My brother. Your real name is Frankie, you holier-than-thou son of a bitch. Why don't you use it? You think you're better than me. You were the golden boy, surrounded by great wise men, groomed to lead a nation. What you are—everything you have—it was supposed to be mine."

Everett didn't believe for an instant Father Washington—Frankie—didn't know about his cloned brother. Maybe he pretended not to but, oh, he knew, he
had
to know. He thought himself above Everett, above the very acknowledgement he had a clone. Everett would see him burn in Hell for what they had done.

The woman Everett grew up believing to be his mother was a short, black woman named Shantell, cursed with a perpetual look of exhaustion. His earliest memories involved screaming and wailing and slamming doors. Her husband—and it was clear early to him her husband was definitely
not
his father, even before he understood the significance of his pale skin—was perpetually angry, constantly accusing Shantell of incomprehensible crimes.

What Everett
did
understand, without it ever having to be said, was that every contention Shantell's husband had with her boiled down to one single problem: The existence of Everett. He would not find out until much later why this was.

Frankie's mother—his
real
mother—hired Shantell to gestate an illegal baby inside her womb. Shantell's husband went along with the plan because they needed the money. But he never liked the idea. It was unnatural to him. And he liked the idea even less when the rich and powerful woman who'd hired them, and who'd agreed to pay their expenses, broke all contact with them. He and Shantell were left with a baby they couldn't afford to raise. By the time Everett was six, Shantell was left to raise him without a husband, too. As far as Everett was concerned, good riddance. The man had done his best to ignore Everett anyway. Well, not ignore, exactly; there was the occasional beating.

Everett didn't know why his ‘adopted’ parents hadn't tried to expose the illegal cloning. Maybe they had. Maybe they'd been too scared they'd be held responsible for the crime. It didn't matter. Nothing about them mattered. He hated them nearly as much as he hated Frankie, as much as he hated his biological mother's memory. As far as Everett was concerned, Shantell had only done one thing right. She had taken him to visit Washington DC.

He'd been around twelve or thirteen. Shantell had taken him to the front of the White House, and then to the mall, hissing angry comments under her breath—comments that didn't make any sense. “A boy should know where he comes from,” she said, and; “Reckon I don't give a rat's ass anymore if one of those spooks sees us here.” By then, Shantell annoyed Everett more than anything, and he tried to stay as far from her as she would tolerate.

He remembered it was in July, and the sun shined so bright it hurt to look at anything. But the grounds along the monuments and the Reflecting Pool were packed with tourists. Children ran weaving through the panels of the World War Two monument. A dog barked at a Frisbee after it splashed into the long pool. Everett had been impressed with the haunted faces of the life-sized statues of Korean War vets, and the massive presence of Abraham Lincoln above him, looking down at the crowd with such a lonely sadness. He'd been less impressed with the giant golden cross erected to commemorate the wars of the Middle East, even if it
did
flow with thick rivulets of painted iron blood.

At one point a lift car appeared out of nowhere, tearing open the sky with its painfully loud roar. Children and adults alike raised their heads, shaded their eyes, and jumped up and down as it passed over them. “The President!” they yelled. “It's Father Washington!"

"Wave to Him,” someone said, and about twenty or thirty people did.
That
was what impressed Everett most. And Shantell's last comment of the day: “You see, boy? All that belongs to you."

If Everett hadn't gone to Washington that day he may never have thought to wonder about where he really came from. That was the day his search for himself began.

Shantell's idea of a proper family household was the perfect portrait hung on their vision room wall, taken a year before her husband left them. Everyone smiling, nothing out of place, no unsightly details exposed. Everett had done his best to disturb the pristine lifelessness of the picture. He burned down a couple houses before he turned fourteen, stole a car when he was fifteen. Saddam had really been taking over back in those days. But he learned an important lesson then, too. It didn't matter what you
did.
It only mattered who you
were
.

Everett finally ran away from home when he was around seventeen, vowing to find out who he truly was. Once the truth became apparent, he vowed revenge. Then he realized there were security guards watching him everywhere he went, constraining him like a straitjacket, suffocating him like a plastic bag over his head. He managed to slip away from them for a long time. He had his face worked on—not too much, just a bit of thinning along his nose, a rounding of his cheekbones. And he started dying his hair. He built himself a life, started a family. But the ‘spooks’ always came back. And then they even had the nerve to steal his only daughter.

The name he had given her was Terry—they called her Leslie now, the bitch. He'd been stunned to see her on the vision, blowing off the head of that Calvin character. She'd filled out since she was a kid and he almost didn't recognize her. But there she was, his little Terry, a part of the enemy. After the initial shock, it seemed somehow fitting to him she would end up on Frankie's side.

A couple days later, Everett had been in Albany to close a small-time arms deal. He was buying cartons of machine guns the United States originally gave to guerrillas staging a coup against the Iranian theocracy, who then traded some of the guns for heroin in Pakistan. From there, they were sold on the black market to a group of Israeli Nationals, who wanted to deal with Everett.

If there was one thing in this world Everett appreciated, it was irony. He'd been sitting in his hotel vision room, chuckling about this irony, when the wall flickered and a commercial for an antidepressant breakfast cereal was replaced by the round bald head of Boris, the leader of the North Creek Atheists cell. “Hey, we need to talk."

Boris told him about Saint Leslie contacting the Calvin operative's little brother. She'd called this poor man and asked to meet him, and he'd panicked and called the USA. Boris wanted Everett's advice. What should they do about it?

It was all Everett could do to keep from laughing as he asked Boris what they knew about this Saint Leslie. “I mean, you must have conducted some intelligence on her by now, right?"

"Yes, of course. But we don't know all that much. I mean, there isn't much to know. Her origins are not a part of official record. She seems to have sprung up into Security from nowhere. However, we
do
know she's central in an experimental program overseen by her superior, Guard Tom Russell."

"The head mem thing?"

"Yes. She's the subject."

Thinking back on it, Everett remembered the complex jumble of feelings that clambered through him at that revelation. If Saint Leslie was the special guard who had the new head mem inside her cranium, then there were certain things that had to be true. First, she had to be precious to Security; but it was unlikely Frankie knew who she was. He wouldn't want his brother's daughter near His inner circle. This made Him vulnerable, politically, because it connected Him to Everett. And if the Atheists could befriend this new hero of the state, then convince her to join them, it would make a powerful statement to the world about Washington's oppression—their own
saints
were defecting! Few politicians’ careers could recover from such an embarrassment, Everett well knew. Frankie would forever be the Father Washington who lost control of His favorite champion. Forget about re-election. Forget about anything. This was an opportunity for a poignant revenge, right there in his lap.

And if Leslie had the head mem implant, the United Sons of Adam's intelligence on the project indicated she probably suffered significant memory suppression. It was possible she had no recollection of Everett, her childhood, of anything before her reincarnation as a guard in security. She might be able to stand right in front of him in full ignorance of his identity. She could be his tool, and she would never know who he was, while she helped him gain a long-anticipated revenge on Frankie. How could he resist such irony!