“Are they done?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “Are they attacking any minute and they’re clearing everyone out in advance?”
“No,” Tauber said immediately. “If they were attackin’ now, they’d’ve cleared out at the end o’ last night. Why keep ‘em in town this long?”
“Then what? Where’d they go?” Max’s hands were in the air, grasping for anything, for any scrap of an idea. We were all dry.
“What’s on the schedule?” Kate asked and we tore to the dining room to check the itinerary again.
“Twenty things.” The 4000 ^ th session of Aid to the Third World, the 2500 ^ th session about Climate Change (formerly the 2500 ^ th session about Global Warming), address by Al Gore, meet and greet with Bono, briefing by former victims of sex trafficking (‘bet that ‘un’s well-attended’-Tauber), starvation as a growing threat to stability and currency fluctuation as economic policy. All sessions behind closed doors, but with photo ops before or after (no open microphones, media please note). Evening dinner, 7 courses, festival of Italian regional dishes (‘no threat to stability there’-Tauber) and the evening concert, Holst and Benjamin/Wyndham-Lewis.
We stood staring at the paper spread out across the table.
“It’s there,” Max said grimly. “The answer’s right there in front of us.”
“Then why are they all gone?”
We were staring at each other like somebody was hiding the secret on purpose. We’d all gone stupid from tension. I slumped onto the couch. There was no answer, that was the answer, but what good was an answer like that?
I don’t know how I fell asleep. I was wired as a cat from exhaustion. I closed my eyes and dropped right out, maybe twenty seconds, maybe two minutes. It wasn’t long, but somehow it was long enough.
When I opened my eyes, everything looked different.
“It’s the music!”
“What?”
“The music last night-in Lowery’s suggestion! It’s Holst!”
“The concert!” Kate ran for the agenda. “Holst-the Planets!”
“‘Mars’ was playing in the background. They’re not feeding her a memory-they’re telling her what’s coming.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Max said. “They dragged a huge crew here to warn her?”
“Maybe they want to beat her down, make her accept it when it comes?” I offered but it sounded stupid coming out of my mouth.
A long pause now but everyone rapt, feeling how close we were to the answer.
“We’re assuming the message is for her,” Kate said finally. “What if it’s for one of the guards- to force one of the guards to kill her?”
“So L Corp doesn’t get the blame. So they can keep their lucrative security trade afterward.”
“Doesn’t work,” Billy said when I got him on the phone. “The concert is the only part of the day that can’t work. It’s Heads of State only in a Plexiglas bubble overlooking the orchestra. Security, L Corp, everybody else locked outside. If the plan is to kill her, that would be the toughest time to do it.”
We each found a different corner of the room now, resentful, disturbed, isolated even from each other. After running so hard to get this far, silence was terrifying. Not having something to do-not knowing what to do-was chewing us up.
I didn’t like my thoughts and I didn’t like being uncomfortable with my thoughts either. I grappled with them for several minutes of silence before opening my mouth.
“There’s no chance we’re fooling ourselves, is there?”
“About which part?” Max asked.
“ All of it,” I answered. “What if-what if you got tired of sitting around the Everglades playing with the electrons in the desk? What if you wanted to do something important? To be important? What if-?”
“What if I made it all up. Volkov, Avery, the bomber in the square-all the people in the square. What if the whole thing is an illusion? Is that what you mean?” He’d read me-I couldn’t deny it.
“Well-you said you made your girlfriend fall in love with you. Kate went to Morocco without leaving the apartment.”
“So I just bought into his fantasy?” Kate snarled. I hated raising that look on her face. “I was so unhappy with my life that I got sucked into-?” She was all wound up but Max cut her off.
“We could all get killed here. We could rot in jail for the rest of our natural lives, whether we stop them or not. And it’s not like you and I couldn’t have made all this up-and convincingly. If anyone’s got doubts, now’s the time to raise them.” He stared out the window for a long moment. “I’ve got doubts myself.”
“Where’s Avery?” Kate sat up like a mannequin on a stand. “If they’re doing a major operation, he should be here, right?”
We ran into the other room and switched on the set. Naturally, they had Your World TV in Italy too. All the big sports stadiums look the same so we weren’t sure for a moment what we were seeing but then the camera tilted back and upward for a moment and we saw the Sydney Opera House in the background.
I head a hissing noise and realized a moment later I was making it. It was the sound of the air coming out of the room.
“Did we get it all wrong?” Kate asked, looking sharply at Max. But his eyes were on Avery, striding the massive stage in Sydney.
“People say to me, ‘Jim, you’re a dreamer. Hope by itself won’t fix what’s broken in the world. Don’t you see the dark clouds on the horizon? Hope’s not an answer.
“And, you see, all that proves is, they don’t understand Your World. This isn’t about me giving you the answers. This is about what we can build together.” Avery stepped toward the camera, eyeing it like the prettiest girl at the dance. “Hope isn’t The Answer-Hope is our belief that, together, we can find answers. When you join Your World, you become a member of a worldwide community who refuse to be categorized, refuse to be led, people who band together to make their own towns and cities into better places to live. Not to build the world I want for them or what Government wants. What they want.”
“What a crock,” I said but Max shushed me right away.
“Quiet,” he said. “He’s talking to us.”
Avery stood heroic, right above the camera, a spotlight winking out behind him as he gestured. “So if the dark clouds are coming, I say let them come. They always have, all through history. But we have a way to fight back!”
Max switched it off. He turned to us, galvanized. “It’s real,” he said. “We’re not wrong.”
“So the whole thing’s a recruiting drive for Your World?” Kate asked, not convinced and I wasn’t sure either.
“Why not? He’s positioning, marketing his corporation. Tonight, he sounds optimistic: I’m not worried about the dark clouds. Tomorrow, they’ll look back at how brilliant, prescient-”
“Almost like he knew what was comin’-”
“Eerie, isn’t it?”
“But what does it get him? What’s he do when they’re all members?”
“Every time Avery speaks of Hope, underneath, he’s festering anger, resentment. I sensed it in the car going to L Corp-in him, they’re the two sides of the same coin. He’s telling his followers, ‘Bring us your anger and we’ll do something about it’. I don’t have to know every detail to know how bad that is.”
Kate bit her lip until it bled. “I’m not asking for details. I just want to know we’re not fooling ourselves. How do we know? For sure?”
Tauber stepped up between the three of us and rolled up his sleeve.
“Bruise,” he announced, pointing. He rolled up the other sleeve. “ Big bruise.” Shirt collar pulled to the side. “Big dark nasty bruise. Souvenirs from my stay at the L Corp Holiday Hotel. If I’m real, they’re real. And if I’m not real, why’ve I got the DT’s and arthritis in my knee?”
“What about Dave?” Max asked me. “What about your father?” he said to Kate. And suddenly I was back in the house in the swamp. The musky smell was up my nostrils, I could see his tongue out and his eyes open and dull. I felt my finger as it touched his eye, the damp squishy feel of it. I remembered the way I felt; the way I thought, the way my brain worked back those few days ago.
