Willful Machines (15 page)

My gaze landed on a photo of a tall, good-looking guy with white-blond hair and a calculating expression that reminded me of the FUUWLs. He stood clutching a trophy above a caption that read, “Paul Waring wins the National Junior Chess League Championship for Inverness Prep.”

Paul Waring. He'd been the director of Bethesda National Laboratory when Mom and Dr. Singh worked there. He'd also ordered Charlotte's termination—and then died in her first attack. I hadn't realized he'd gone to Inverness Prep too. It seemed like everyone on earth had a connection to this place. The people who were important, at least. Or, as in my case, the people who happened to be related to the people who were important.

Stroud's voice rumbled from my puck. “You may come in, Lee. Leave your puck outside, please.”

I felt a coldness in my chest, like I'd just swallowed ice. It pushed out the warmth that had lingered there ever since my kiss with Nico. My hand burrowed into my hoodie pocket and wrapped around Gremlin. “Stay out here, puck,” I said. Trumbull opened the door. I found myself wishing I could ask him to come in with me. What good was a Secret Service detail if it couldn't protect you from the things that
really
scared you?

S
troud had never summoned me to his office for a reprimand before. Of course, Bex had made the trip plenty of times. She always tried to shrug off those visits afterward, calling them more annoying than anything else, but I could tell they rattled her. As for me, I'd started having nightmares about my grandfather long before I'd set foot at Inverness Prep.

I'd seen him only once as a young kid. Dad had idolized Stroud pretty much all his life—he'd never known his own dad, and he often said Stroud was the closest thing he'd had to a father—but I always got the feeling Mom didn't want him around me. I was five or so when he finally came to visit. Before he arrived, Dad told me about his imprisonment and escape, about how much he'd taught Dad at Inverness Prep, about how he'd teach me a lot too when my turn came to attend the school. “He can seem serious,” Dad said, “because he's been through a lot, but don't let that scare you.” So naturally the guy terrified
me before I'd even laid eyes on him. When he appeared at the front door, with his white crew cut, straight spine, and crooked shoulders, he reminded me of a broken G.I. Joe action figure. I noticed he didn't have a puck floating near him. I'd never seen that before. It seemed almost like not having a soul. His eyes were like splintered blue glass, and when he turned them on me, I just about burst into tears.

He didn't visit again until Mom's funeral four years later. After that he came to our house more regularly, but he never spoke much to me. Instead, he'd ask Dad a few questions about me while looking me up and down. Then he'd seem to lose interest, which I never minded at all. Even after I arrived at Inverness, he barely said a word to me. I still didn't understand why Dad had found him so inspiring. Whenever he looked my way in the halls, it unnerved me almost as much as it had when I was five.

Stroud's office door clicked shut behind me. He hadn't acknowledged my presence yet. He sat bent over his massive desk, still wearing his suit, his hands busy with some odd, intricate activity. I couldn't tell what it was.

An enormous window consisting of many panes of glass stretched across the wall behind him. During the day the window offered a view of the lake, but tonight I couldn't see much of anything. The clouds had moved back in since Nico and I had returned. An enormous marble fireplace dominated one side of the room, with a fire popping and snapping on the
hearth but doing little to lift the gloom. Above the mantel, where other men might place a deer's head or ceremonial sword, hung the two-foot-long titanium thighbone he'd dug out of my other grandfather's leg. Just seeing it made the back of my neck prickle.

“Good evening, Lee,” Stroud said without looking up.

“Good evening, sir.” I stepped closer to the desk as I answered. Now I could see what he was doing:
writing
. With a pen, on paper. Nobody did
that
anymore. “I'm sorry about all this,” I added. “I know it's late.”

“I'm always awake at this time of night.” He put down the pen. His chair creaked as he returned his spine to its usual ramrod-straight position. He leveled his blue eyes at me. Inside, I flinched. “Tell me what this is all about. Trumbull said you sneaked out of the building, breaking curfew and leaving your Secret Service detail with no idea where you'd gone. Why would you do something like that? Especially today, when you barely survived what may have been an attempt on your life?”

“It really wasn't that serious, what happened this morn—”

“I'm not asking about what happened this morning. I'm asking about what happened tonight.”

“It was poor judgment, sir. I guess I get claustrophobic sometimes, with my detail always hovering around me.”

His mouth twisted into a smile. “You want to know what claustrophobia feels like? Try spending nine years in a six-foot-by-eight-foot room.”

I looked down at my muddy sneakers. “Of course,” I mumbled. “I'm sorry, sir.”

“I've been thinking a lot about my time in that room lately.” He picked up the pen again and made a single mark in the notebook in front of him. Maybe he'd forgotten to cross a
t
. “I'm setting down my life story. People have asked me for decades to write a book about my experiences, but I never have. I don't believe in dwelling on the past. And with a past like mine, I certainly don't enjoy it. But a month ago, when the Statue of Liberty became a blazing ruin, I finally hauled out this antiquated paper and pen and got started. I can see we've entered a new age of terrorism. I owe it to my country to share what I learned living in that cell—and getting myself out.”

My eyes darted back to the thighbone hanging above the mantel.

“I keep it to remind me of the man who saved my life,” he said. “And to remind me of what I had to do to survive.”

Stroud walked over to the fireplace, his left hip hitching slightly. He lifted the bone from the wall. Without thinking about it, I took a step back. He may have had a mangled body, but it still exuded a wiry strength.

“The first time he mentioned his thighbone,” Stroud said, “he meant it as a joke. There we were, your grandfather Fisher and I, in a tiny, empty room. No tools. No weapons. Nothing to help us escape. ‘There's always my thighbone,' he said. A couple of years earlier, during our first tour, an IED had partially
blown off his leg, and the doctors had replaced his shattered femur with this.” He hefted the bone. “Care to hold it?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

His eyes drifted to the fire. “Years passed. Our captors beat and tortured us almost every day. George's health began to fail. Eventually, he didn't think he'd survive another beating. ‘But if you kill me here in the cell,' he said, ‘you can take out my thighbone and use it to get out of this place.' ”

My nape tingled again. I'd already heard most of these details before, but getting the story from Stroud's own mouth chilled me anyway. He'd never spoken about it with me before. He stared into the fireplace, the flickering light painting his craggy face a gruesome orange and giving his tale the feel of a campfire ghost story.

“At first I refused to consider it. George Fisher was my best friend on earth. How could I do something like that to him? But then one evening the guards brought him back to the cell so ravaged he could barely speak. He managed to get out only three words: ‘Please do it.' So I gathered up my courage, told him I'd always watch over his wife and young son back in the States, and broke the man's neck. Then I clawed into his leg with my bare fingers. It took me all night to dig out this bone.”

I gulped while images of the Spam casserole Nico had been eating earlier that day flashed through my mind.

“When the guards entered the cell the next day to remove George's body, I bashed in their skulls and made my escape.”

He held the bone closer to the light and showed me the brownish-red smears that still covered it. My knees felt unsteady: blood happened to be yet another of my phobias.

“Back in the States, journalists asked me over and over, ‘What kept you going all that time?' I told them George Fisher used to remind me of something our football coach here at Inverness would say to us: ‘Adversity destroys some people and makes others stronger. Which is it going to be?' George repeated those words every day—even as his own life ebbed away. And they helped. I imagined all my trials only increasing my strength. I still believe it today: what I experienced was unspeakable, but it made me who I am now.”

My grandfather looked at me again. The firelight made his eyes flash without giving them any warmth. I had to fight the urge to back farther away from him.

“So if you think you have it tough here,” he said, “taking classes, eating wholesome food, sleeping in a comfortable bed, accompanied wherever you go by people whose only job is to keep you safe, think again.”

“Yes, sir.”

He shook his head. “America—the whole world, I suppose—has become so obsessed with making things easier. We've created machines that do all our physical labor for us, and much of our thinking, too. Now we're on the verge of letting machines live for us. And then where will we be?” He used the thighbone to jab one of the logs on the fire. It flared as it resettled, sending
up a swarm of sparks. “We've forgotten that it's the work, the struggle, the suffering that make us who we are.”

He returned the bone to its place. Below it, on the mantel, stood two framed photographs, one of Mom as a girl, her wild red hair wrangled into two braids, and one of a fresh-faced young man with big ears poking out from under the sleek white hat of a US Marine: George Fisher. After regarding the picture of my other grandfather for a second, Stroud went back to his desk and indicated a chair across from him. I sat.

“Your father and I had a meeting about you before he gave his speech yesterday morning. He's disappointed in your performance here. So am I.”

“My grades are okay.”

“Lee, as your headmaster and as your grandfather, I expect more from you than mediocre grades. I expect you to excel. And I expect you to stay safe and be responsible. You're blood, and blood means something to me. Your mother and I didn't often see eye to eye, but she was blood, and I loved her.” He glanced at the picture of her on the mantel. “She had fire, your mother.”

“Yes, she did, sir.”

“I always respected her for that.” His eyes returned to me. His lips pursed, like he'd smelled something rotten. “And you. You're blood, too. As hard as it is for me to believe sometimes. You inherited neither your mother's fire nor your father's self-discipline.”

“People say I got his ears.”

He didn't find that funny. “You're also an important boy, Lee.”

He paused, as if waiting for me to respond, but I never knew what to say when people made pronouncements like that. Did the fact that my father happened to be president
really
make me important? It wasn't like I'd done anything myself.

“As the First Son, you're a symbol to this country,” Stroud said, answering my unspoken question. “And even though you lack talent and ambition, your name and advantages may yet afford you the chance to do some meaningful work of your own. I can't have you taking chances with your life like you did tonight. Especially after what happened earlier today.”

“I already told you, sir, that was just a malfunction.”

“No one else who was there seems to think so. Trumbull, Dr. Singh, the other students—they were all very alarmed. I was alarmed too when I watched the video the pucks recorded. Dr. Singh is still studying the local network log to see what it can tell us. Until we know more, we all need to take what happened seriously. Last month's assault on the Statue of Liberty showed what damage a remote electronic attack can do. I want to make sure nothing like that happens here. Trumbull and his team are very capable, and they already have this situation well in hand, but I'd like to make a contribution.”

Stroud placed a small wooden box on the table between us and opened the lid. Inside rested what looked like a silver
wristwatch—the old-fashioned kind, with a round face and hands to tell the time.

“I received this device from an alumnus who's become one of the most powerful arms manufacturers in the world. It's a prototype. Only a few of them exist.”

“What does it do?”

“It's a kind of bomb. When you press these two buttons on the side and hold them for three seconds, the watch releases a powerful pulse of electromagnetic radiation. The pulse doesn't harm human beings, but it destroys anything electronic within a thirty-foot radius.”

“So it's like what Dr. Singh used on Charlotte.”