Klein’s bearing had changed little in the last few weeks. He leaned forward and seemed to aim his words at a target down-range. He spoke to his own sense of himself as it related to his own history. He spoke in broad strokes and then tightened — with a slight vibrato — to the details of the case.
“We think Rake has a history of finding recently treated patients and kidnapping them. We’ve already covered that.” Klein reached out to align the pipes on his rack again, fingering the bowls. “She was released into the Grid with a tacking band and he somehow knew she was coming out of treatment, knew she’d be freshly enfolded, and he showed up there — most likely hiked his way in — around day two after her arrival. He must’ve found his way to a list. The lists are going on the black market, and you know, well, we’ve been through all of this but it won’t hurt to repeat it. You might hear something that triggers an idea, Singleton.” (Klein lifted a pipe from the rack — an absurdly long meerschaum, broken in, tobacco colored — and twiddled it between his fingers. His mouth puckered and he sucked the stem and then put it back and took another pipe, holding it up, explaining that it was a Dublin, beautiful bird’s-eye briar. Then he fixed it, packing, poking, lighting, puffing.) “Her record — I mean the enfolded material — is officially sealed to us, of course. But what we do know is that she was fixed and released with tag.”
“Yes, sir, tagged.”
“No, not tagged. With tag.”
“Yes, sir. With tag.”
Klein stood up again and moved to the window. Overhead, the building thrummed. Files were held somewhere off facility, locked away, bending against clips, rubber banded and color coded. His own was out there somewhere, Singleton thought, stored in some secure location, loaded with the facts and figures and the basic stage directions of what had to be replicated — a mass shooting, a booby trap, he didn’t really know anymore — during the enfold, reenacted into memory with the help of the go-to drug, Tripizoid, and doubled back on itself hopefully forever. One peek in a file — it was said — and the memories would rush back and the fuzzball in the head would explode and you’d be back in the shit again. Treatment failed if the treated knew, or even suspected, that the treated material, the information, could be accessed again. Without a sense of privacy, reenactment failed. Klein went on about Rake’s noir tendencies and how it was clear in his actions, in the blood paintings, in the traces he left behind, that he had an inclination to instill his actions with drama, and that this was key — this might be the key.
“Brando,” Singleton said.
“Yes, Brando syndrome. I’ve thought of that. And Dean. Most of the dramatic types imagine themselves as inheritors of a great rebellious tradition and see no need to find a cause for their rebellions, so they lean toward Dean. Auden said, ‘It’s the insane will of the insane to suffer insanely.’ Something like that. It’s the same with actors. The line between what they’re presenting and their own inner life thins, if they’re weak of will, and the character they’re embodying becomes the body they’re presenting, something like that. When you consider the fact that Rake is a failed enfold and he has dramatic inclinations … I hope you’re listening to me, Singleton. We’re talking about grunt-level thinking, and to get to that you have to go to the random particulars, or the particulars that seem to map out the random. Like I said, it seems to me — and this is an example of trusting your gut — that it bears repeating that Rake came back from Vietnam and was enfolded in the early experimental station down in New Mexico, most likely at the Las Vegas facility, which I’m sure you know was considered substandard, although there wasn’t a standard at that time because it was the only facility. Not the gambling Nevada Vegas, but the New Mexico Vegas. Then he escaped to Amarillo and, as is typical for these men, made his way here to Michigan.”
“Yes, sir. Then we lost his trail,” Singleton told himself to say, and said. He had learned over the last two weeks to beat the dead horse, and keep beating it. Kick the can down the road. Fill up these training sessions with as much of his own verbiage as possible.
“Then he popped back in April, made his mark. Now every random killing up north, every psycho killing, every gang-related draw-and-quarter gets pinned on him whether he did it or not. We’ve got these dinky, small-town cops, these half-assed sheriff deputies flashing badges, talking to the liaison, who comes here with his pleas, his missives that imply that we must know where the guy is. Cops want to shoot him dead. Command wants to get him back in for another round of treatment.”
He plucked the string — a shooting in Petoskey on April 5 to a shooting near the Indiana border, an old man shot in the head on April 6.
“There was something in her file about a man named Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, a vet who was killed in the war,” Singleton told himself to say, and said.
Klein went to his desk and opened a file. “Here it is: Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, came back out of rotation for a stateside visit, fell in love with a girl — name redacted, but we can assume it’s Meg — took her away to California on a wild road trip, was AWOL for ten weeks and then got sent back with limited disciplinary charges on account of his sharpshooting abilities, or something. He was KIAed on his second rotation and his trail ended. Whereas her trail ends in this shit.” Klein pointed at the map, the pins, the strings.
“He came home in a bag,” Singleton said.
“A casket with a flag, as simple as that.”
“Then the girl cracked.”
“One can only assume. The file is sealed, of course.”
Klein closed the meeting with a handshake and a command to take the afternoon off. That was how it worked. You spent the morning in so-called briefings and then were given the afternoon to wander and think and absorb and, in the parlance of the Corps, go Internal.
* * *
The last of the industrial surge, cars partly formed, their frames and skeletal strutwork floating down the line, bucking slightly from the conveyor jerk, surrounded by the pop of pneumatic guns and bolt drivers as he punched the rivets quickly and then stood back, looking sadly down the line at the other men who seemed caught in a perplexity of automated movement, waiting for the next door to arrive. That’s what she looked like standing in the lobby — another incognito worker, another cog having a smoke after a hard shift on the line, gazing around as if looking for an opportune moment to escape, dressed in her regulation stretch pants and white blouse.
But her face brightened and she gave him a second glance and he knew they were going to join each other for lunch against regulations because that’s what they did — they went out onto the sidewalk after being briefed, zoned out on data, and then they let their instincts take over.
She glanced at him again and then went ahead through the revolving door while he stayed in the lobby and tried to look casual. A guard was staring at her as she stood with her face up to the sun, the noontime breeze ruffling her blouse. Singleton waited until two more agents had passed through the door before he went out into the glare.
“Hey,” she said. “We’d better stand here a second and pretend to have a friendly face-to-face, agent-to-agent greeting, and then I’ll go ahead and you follow.”
“How’s your case going?” he said. He liked her eyes. They were the blue of faded denim, and they didn’t look at all enfolded.