World of Trouble (25 page)

He would have spent a lot more time in jail, over the years, except he had a special knack for gathering acolytes and setting them up to do the dirty work—younger men and plenty of younger women, who frequently ended up serving prison sentences for carrying, for selling, all the stuff that otherwise he would have done himself. One parole officer lamented, somewhere in DeCarlo’s thick case file, that he “would have made a great leader, had things gone another way.”

And then they did, they really did, things went another way. The asteroid appeared, transforming the lives of thugs and drug dealers right along with policemen and actuaries and Amish patriarchs. By
the time there was a ten percent chance that Maia would smash into the Earth, Anthony Wayne DeCarlo is living in a basement apartment in Medford, Mass., and he has become Astronaut: leader of a movement, weaver of conspiratorial webs, savior of humanity.

For a restless soul like DeCarlo, paranoid and insecure, Maia was the answer to a prayer he didn’t even know he was praying; a basket in which to put a lifetime of inchoate antiauthoritarian energy. Suddenly he’s on a soapbox in Boston Common, a charismatic voice for the government conspiracy line, a street-corner preacher with a fistful of dubious scientific “findings” and a handgun jammed in his back pocket. And he’s attracting a new constellation of followers: young people, freaked out by death rolling across the sky, looking for something—anything—to do about it.

They fell for it. My sister fell for it. And it’s not hard to see why, it’s never been hard to understand. The alternative was to believe what her droning, lecturing, scolding cop brother kept telling her: We’re in for it. There’s no hope. The truth is true. The Astronauts of the world were selling a better story, much easier to swallow. The Man is setting us up. The fat cats and the big shots, brother, they
want
you to die.

Lies, lies—it’s all lies!

It’s around this point, late autumn last year, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation starts keeping tabs on Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Astronaut. The FBI, like most federal agencies, is suffering from employee attrition, with agents leaving in droves on their various Bucket List adventures. For those still at their desks, a lot of the workload in the last year has been keeping an eye on
creeps like DeCarlo, all the terrorists and psychopaths and run-of-the-mill criminal jackasses whom Maia has given a new lease on life, all of them talking big about last-ditch antigovernment violence, how they’re going to reveal or disrupt the cover-up, whatever they claim is being covered up: the government made up the asteroid, the government is hiding the truth of the asteroid, the government built the asteroid. You name it.

Astronaut and his crew weren’t even cracking the top thirty, in terms of threats worth worrying about, until a kid named Derek Skeve got caught breaking into the New Hampshire National Guard station. Under interrogation he admitted that he had been pressured into the dangerous mission by his new wife.

“It was Nico who sent him in there, see? She sacrificed him,” says Jordan, whose name is not really Jordan. “It was demanded of her. To prove her loyalty to Astronaut, to the organization, the goals of the organization.”

Jordan’s name is really Agent Kessler; William P. Kessler Jr. My mind is filling with new information, filling up fast.

“DeCarlo loves to play these kinds of cruel games with his people: in group/out group dynamics, tests of loyalty,” says Kessler. “He used to do it when he was running dope: needle scumbag number one into lowering the hatchet on scumbag number two, and he’s your scumbag forever. He did the same tricks to build his new conspiracy group.”

Agent Kessler is FBI. He was a trainee in the technical services division, he told me, rapidly promoted to field agent, just as I was rapidly promoted to detective when everybody else quit
or disappeared. The Astronaut conspiracy was his first case—“still working on it, as a matter of fact,” he says, staring up at the flagpole, at the ragged lawn of the Rotary police station.

It took ten minutes of good cop/bad cop for Skeve to start babbling about moon bases, and Kessler’s team knew he was a patsy. But then they got ahold of one of Astronaut’s other shed dupes and figured out what the man was really after: loose nukes. They decided to give them to him. Kessler made his debut as Jordan Wills, a smug wisecracking provocateur in cheap Ray-Bans.

“I showed up at the dude’s house in the middle of the night,” says Jordan. Kessler. “And I give him this whole crazy rap. I’m a former Navy midshipman. ‘I’ve got this hidden trove of documents, about this scientist and his master plan. I heard about your group … you’re the only ones who can help us. You’re the only ones!’ ”

“And he bought it?”

“Oh, yes,” says Kessler. “God, yes. We told him there were other teams, teams all over the country. We gave him the specific part that he and his buddies were supposed to play. And zoom. Off they go. Chasing the imaginary bombs in all the places I told them to look. Hither and thither, hither and yon. Kept them from killing anybody. Kept them from finding any
actual
bombs. Kept them spinning their wheels.”

I listen. I nod. It’s good—it’s a good story. The kind of story that I like, the story of a well-conceived and well-executed law-enforcement operation, carried out by diligent operatives staying on the job to keep decent people safe even in the most difficult circumstances. A slow-play sting with a clear intention and a simple
strategy: identify the membership of the organization, keep it busy, feed the fire of their lunatic hope. The story, though, it’s hitting me in a tender place, it really is. I’m listening and periodically I’m reaching up to clutch my face while tears roll down and around my fingers.

Kessler and his fellow agents provided Astronaut with all the necessary window dressing to convince them they were involved in a real conspiracy. Internet access and communications equipment, official-looking NASA and Naval Intelligence documents. And of course the ultimate prop: an SH-60 Seahawk, a twin-engine medium-lift helicopter that one of Kessler’s FBI associates was able to “borrow” from a Navy division that had just been recalled from peacekeeping operations, now moot, in the Horn of Africa.

All the stuff that made me wonder, in my dark moments, if I was wrong, if the truth was not the truth. It all looked real because it was supposed to look real.

“What about the document itself?” I ask him. I’ve still got it, it’s in the wagon somewhere, fifty pages of gobbledygook and indecipherable math. “Where did the numbers come from? The whole—the plan?”

“The Internet.” Jordan shrugs. “Public records. Someone might have pulled a file from NASA. The truth is, at a certain point it was like a game. How preposterous can we make the whole thing? How unlikely a scenario, how self-evidently unbelievable, and see if these people would still believe it. Turns out: pretty much all the way. People will believe pretty much any goddamn thing if they want to bad enough.”

The endgame played out just as they had imagined it. Kessler
in his role as Jordan lets Astronaut know that Parry has been located and set free—one fake person telling a conman about the location of another fake person—and that he, Jordan, is arranging his transportation to the Ohio location. It’s Astronaut’s responsibility to gather up everyone else, get to this abandoned police station near a municipal airfield, and wait.

“And he did it.”

“Of course he did. By that time, he was sure that he really was going to save the world. He thought he was the drug-dealing robber who had turned into an action hero. But we were writing the script, and the script ended with them sitting in the middle of nowhere, not bothering anybody, waiting for someone who doesn’t exist, until lights out.”

*  *  *

We walk slowly through the woods, Kessler and I. To the small rutted field surrounded by bent trees. Patches of black-red blood are still evident in the muddy puddle where I found the body. He told me he wants to see the crime scene; take prints, do a sweep for evidence. I’ve explained that I did all of those things, but he said he’d like to do it himself.

He wants to see, so here we are, but he’s not doing anything. Agent Kessler just stands at the edge of the clearing, looking at the ground.

Everything is clear except one thing, and even that is pretty clear.

“Jordan?”

“Kessler,” he reminds me quietly, stepping into the clearing.

“Kessler. What happened? Why are you here?”

He squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them again.

“Kessler?”

He’s crouching down on his heels, staring at the mud where Nico died. I need to hear him say it, though. I need to know everything. I have to.

“Kessler? Why did you come out here?”

He speaks slowly. His voice is choked, low.

“DeCarlo’s a maniac. At heart. The file is spiked with bad acts. Sudden violence. He gets double-crossed or cheated, or when things go wrong … bad acts.” The smug kid that I so hated is gone; the furious FBI agent on a mission is gone. Kessler is just a kid. A young guy with a heavy heart. “We knew he was capable of anything at the end, if he figured out that it was all bullshit—or even if he didn’t figure it out. When he finally realized that the world was really going to die, that
he
was really going to die. The fucking narcissist. God knows what sort of horror show this thing might turn into.” He drifts off, staring. “God knows.”

I picture my sister facedown in the dirt. Of course I do. I can’t help it. Facedown in the dirt, her open wound clotting with mud.
God knows
.

“I couldn’t—” Kessler says, and then he breathes through his teeth, stamps his boot on the ground. He covers his face with his hand. “All the rest of ’em, fuck ’em. Stupid wild-eyed hippies, let ’em get what they deserve. Trying to steal a fucking bomb. But not—” He
cries out again. He sinks slowly to his knees. “Not her.”

I knew it. I guess I’ve known it since he came limping down the hallway to the cell.

“You—had feelings for her.”

He laughs, a wet mucous weeping laugh. “Yeah. You man-child. You weirdo. I had feelings for her. I fucking
loved
her.”

“But you could have saved her. You could have told her not to come, told her it was all a set-up.”

“I did!” He looks at me, not angry but imploring. Desperate. Bereft. “I told her
everything
. That day in New Hampshire, out in Butler Field, waiting for the chopper to come and scoop her up, I told her that the whole thing was a set-up, that I was an FBI agent, that DeCarlo was a fraud and a psychopath. Capable of anything.” He chokes out the nickname. “Big Pharma. I showed her my fucking badge.” He trails off. “But …”

Damn it, Nico—damn it. “She didn’t believe you.”

Kessler nods, exhales. “It was too late. She was too deep into it. Into this fantasy world that I created my damn self. I said, you’ll believe me when Parry never shows up. I said, promise me, if he doesn’t show up in two weeks, you’ll steal this fucking helicopter and come back home. I said,
promise me
.” He is crying now, his face buried in his hands.

No way she promised. My sister has never promised anything.

“She never came back. I had to come. At a certain point, I just—I couldn’t stop thinking about her—try and find her. I couldn’t let her die out here—” and he says it, the exact words I was thinking ten minutes ago. “Couldn’t let her die out here for nothing.”

Neither one of us says what is obvious and true, that he was too late. That we were, both of us, too late.

Agent Kessler doesn’t actually look for evidence. He doesn’t take any prints. He just stares at the ground for a while, and then we turn around and slowly walk back together through the woods.

Now it’s my turn. I’ve got his story and now Agent Kessler wants mine.

We make our way back through the woods from the crime scene to the police station, stepping over brambles and then across the rope bridge, grunting with the exertion, two twentysomethings hamstrung by multiple injuries, walking slowly through the woods like old, old men. While we walk I run down the investigation in progress, piece by piece: I tell him about finding Jean in the woods, about the subsequent discovery of Nico’s body, bearing a similar injury, similar in kind but not degree; I tell him about my eyewitness to Nico’s argument with Astronaut an hour before her death. I talk and talk, and he interrupts on occasion with insightful or clarifying questions, and we fall into my old favorite rhythm of conversational police work—the laying out of a fact pattern, the straightening out of details in my own mind so they
can be vetted by a fellow officer.

When we are back at the police station Kessler stops in Dispatch to examine Nico’s body while I go back to the garage and walk slowly around the cratered wreck at the center of the floor. It looks like Cortez took the time to fill up the stairwell with as much rock as he could—all the stones that resulted from smashing out the wedge, plus more big chunks he jackhammered out from all over the garage floor. It’s rutted and cratered in here, like the surface of the moon. At the edge of the pit is a loose end of rope, snaking out from the pile of rubble. I can picture my erstwhile sidekick after he left me in the jail cell: loading up the tarp with stones, pulling it down in his wake, collapsing the tunnel mouth behind him like the Red Sea crashing down behind Moses.

Cortez, putting up a
KEEP OUT
sign; Cortez, taking over the lease.

“No way on the suicide,” says Kessler abruptly, coming into the room.

“What?”

He clears his throat. “The rest of them, sure. For the rest of them, I like it. They give up on Parry, maybe they realize they got punked. Maybe they even realize DeCarlo is a psycho. Life postimpact is going to be brutish and short. Bunker or no bunker. Poison becomes the good option.”

Kessler’s manner on all this is staccato, clipped, just the facts. He’s doing exactly what I did after looking at what he was just looking at: Nico’s frozen face, the red and black wreck of her throat.
He’s wrapping up the pain of that in
CAUTION
tape, drowning it out in crime-stopper rhythms. I like it. I find it soothing.