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Walking along K
Street, he allowed himself to be carried along with the necessities of
the day—a wire to a certain place, a file he had to study and write
about in a certain way. At the entrance to the building he slowed down
and considered the day to come, looking up and down the street like a
man who expected someone to catch up with him, or a man who feared he
might have been left behind. Then into the building, showing his ID to
an indifferent guard. A moment later he stood alone in an ascending
elevator car staring at his distorted image in the security mirror in
the upper rear right corner of the ceiling. It made him appear odd and
angular about the face and shoulders.
Morning, said the
guard at the entrance to the floor. Winston Smith, his name tag said.
Jenkins nodded,
showed his ID again—every morning a different guard but the same
cheerful inflection in the greeting—and if the guard hadn't seemed so
interested in studying his ID so carefully, Jenkins would have felt as
though they had got wind of something.
Yes, sir, Winston
Smith said, turning sideways in order to punch the code into the door
lock. The door to the suite swung open.
Jenkins stepped
in.
Good morning,
Warren, the secretary said from behind her desk, her face a mass of
pinkish carbuncles.
Good morning,
Lydia, Jenkins said. I always think I'm early. But here you are.
Can't get ahead
of Lydia is what I say.
Well, sir, she
said, touching a finger to one of her desolate cheeks.
Fenton in yet?
Oh, yes, sir, you're
not anywhere near as early as you think.
He felt his
stomach do a little flip, as though his breakfast hadn't really settled
yet.
Anything...? he
said.
She leaned
forward in her chair and said in a voice that sank almost to a whisper,
Pete got a
message.
Oh?
News is there's
no news.
Jenkins released
from his lungs air he hadn't been aware he had been holding in.
So there's still
a chance.
You didn't hear
it from me.
I better go in,
he said.
Was she a sly
woman? He had never thought of her that way, but now a smile he could
only describe as sly passed across her ruined face.
You'd better.
Something in her
voice kept him rooted to the spot.
I'd better?
Get it over with.
Get what over
with?
Your day.
It's just begun,
Lydia?
Finish it.
I'm considering
it.
There's always
more.
You're so
cryptic, Lydia. You should work for a secret agency.
I've thought of
it, the secretary said, touching a finger once to her pitted forehead.
I'm off then,
Jenkins said and flashed her a weak smile before passing her desk and
heading along the inner corridor. The door to the Cell was shut—which
meant that either no one was in there or that they were already at work.
Even after all these months he had to catch himself from stopping at the
door to listen for some kind of sound from within.
Fenton stepped
out into the corridor just ahead.
Jenkins?
Good morning.
Jenkins' eyes darted down to his shoes. So strange. It was as if he could
tell that something was going to happen seconds before there was any
indication whatsoever. Unless it was Fenton's voice.
Come in now, the
man said.
As soon as he
walked through the door, Jenkins understood. A tall man in a white shirt
stood alongside Fenton's work-table. On the table sat some sort of
apparatus with gauges and wires and a sort of antenna.
Oh, Jenkins said.
Sit down, Fenton
said.
Yeah, make
yourself comfortable, the other man said.
Jenkins looked
over at the wall-size mirror that fooled nobody with its seemingly
ordinary appearance. He had stood on the other side of it and watched
other men move about this very room, though he never thought he would be
standing here in this fashion one day himself.
Now, said the man
in the white shirt, sit down.
Jenkins looked
over at Fenton.
Sit, Fenton said,
going to the door and pulling it shut.
It went quickly,
thirty minutes or so with a cuff from the machine wrapped around his
bare arm, and then he was free and standing again, his forehead dripping
with sweat, turning his eyes around the spinning room.
Go, Fenton said,
opening the door.
Jenkins went
along the corridor to his own office and used the code to open the door.
He sat down behind his desk with a jarring thud and looked around almost
to apologize. He hadn't meant to make such a racket. Turning toward his
window he allowed numbers and questions to proliferate in his head. A grey-bodied pigeon stared back at him from the ledge, unknowing of his
predicament. With a flutter of wings, it departed, leaving him behind to
stare at large white clouds hovering above the monuments, clouds so
still that they might have been pasted onto the pale blue backdrop of
the sky.
The telephone
chirped.
I want you to
cool off, Fenton said over the line. Take a walk around the block.
What?
I don't like this
any more than you do. Take a walk around the block.
Cool off. I shouldn't
say that but I'm saying it.
This is how he
found himself walking east on K Street, effecting what he took to be the
gait of a man in control. But his breath came up short and his mind was
whirling.
Passers-by moved
alongside him toward the corner. An Asian woman in a business suit
glanced at him—never happened before. Jenkins turned his face away and
edged off toward the curb so that when the light changed he made his
move, a few paces ahead of her. When he looked back she was gone.
Or was that the
woman walking far down the block in a southerly direction?
Her dark body
bobbed upon the horizon. The White House loomed ahead of her. Jenkins
swallowed hard and turned around, his heart working like the engine of a
car in trouble.
A Fed Ex van
rolled slowly along the service road. On the right a man lingered in the
doorway of a copy shop. The van pulled in to an illegal space on the
roadway just ahead of him and he could hear the engine ticking as it
cooled. At the entrance to a bar he turned into the doorway, walking
directly past the blonde woman writhing naked on the little stage.
So we'll go no
more a-rovin, he said to the stick-thin black man with the shaved head
who stood guard at the fire exit.
The man reacted
as though he had been hit by a pea from a pea-shooter but recovered
instantly and handed Jenkins a set of keys.
You? said a white
boy with shoulder-length brown hair leaning against the wall of the
alley.
So late into the
night, Jenkins said.
Sword and
sheathe, man, the fellow said. He touched a finger to a gadget in the
palm of his hand and locks clicked open on a black auto parked further
down the alley. Jenkins went to the car and climbed into the driver's
seat, started it up, and drove onto the street.
It was not yet
full summer, but in the time since he had arrived at the office and then
departed, the heat had risen and the air seemed to have filled with
particularates which made for waving and weaving odd lines of force
outside the windshield. Jenkins didn't have an easy time steering the
car because of this. His mind wavered with the patterns in the air, and
he was amazed by this, amazed at what fear could do to a person's vision.
No matter how much he tried to stop thinking about it, pieces of the
plan kept rising to the surface of his mind, but he managed to muster enough
of his training to push them down.
Crossing the
river, he caught a last ironic glimpse of the massive figures and
animals standing guard at either side of the bridge, huge equine
haunches and beautifully enormous breasts. Rolling around the
traffic circle on the Virginia side and doubling back toward the
airport, Jenkins watched carefully for the road he had never taken
except in fantasies about escape. When it came up—the name of Lyndon
Johnson, of all people, on the sign—he felt his breath quicken and he
had to calm himself—calm yourself, calm yourself—in a way he had not
found possible when Fenton had overseen the administration of the
flutter.
He pulled the car
over onto the grass and got out. Soft earth underfoot. Thin spindles of
morning mist rose into the air just beyond the trees where the water
began.
One foot after
another, and he thought that he might just step on down through the
ground cover and into the world beneath where lived giant worms and moles and other varieties of danger. With a few shakes of his
head, he put such fears behind him—or beneath—and stepped out onto the
wooden dock.
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