Still I said nothing. Maris was not done. He scraped his chair out of the circle, moved it closer to mine, keeping the shotgun between his legs. I considered ways I might have disarmed him, even with my hands tied to the chair as they were. Things I had learned.
“How many has it been? How many have you brought in, in your hunt? How many?”
When still I said nothing, Maris flared his nostrils, narrowed his gaze.
“You do not even know. Is that it? More than you can count? More than you think of?”
Two hundred ten. I could have told him if I wanted to. Two hundred ten since Chicago, since Bridge in the basement of the federal building, since my training in the Arizona desert. Two hundred ten, including this most recent: Jackdaw. Kevin. Son of Charles and Chandra.
Kevin of the Brightmoor section of Detroit, Michigan.
I held my hands and felt the blood creep out of my shoulder.
It was nearly nightfall before the door of that old abandoned community center creaked open and Barton came in, with Cook behind him.
Barton, out of clerical costume and in jeans and a shirt, carried a laptop under one arm. Cook leaned against the wall and chewed his gum while Barton pulled a chair out of the circle and dragged it by the back until he was sitting across from me.
He opened the laptop and turned it so I could see the screen. Maris stayed where he was, the shotgun balanced across his knees.
Barton clicked on a familiar icon, and a map opened up on his screen. The map showed the world, then it zoomed in, a sickening, rapid descent, until it showed the United States, then Indiana, then the city. There was a red dot, midcity, and it flashed on and off, on and off.
“Do you know what that is?” said the priest.
“I do.”
“Tell me what it is.”
I stared at the dot. I was transfixed. “It’s me.”
“Correct.” He shut the computer and stood up. “It’s you.”
“How is this possible?” I said, as if that mattered. As if that were the important thing. I was trying to figure out what was happening here-what was next.
“As you know, this man is a law enforcement officer. There are certain channels to which he has access.”
Cook waved his hand. “A man owed me a favor.”
I took a new look at Officer Cook, and he returned my gaze steadily, slight smile, eyebrows raised. No big deal, his face was saying, but we both knew-if perhaps Barton did not-that this was a very big deal indeed. I imagined Mr. Bridge’s reaction if he were to discover this pinhole leak in the steel sides of the US Marshals Service Information Technology Division.
Barton kept his eyes on me.
“You are a tracker, and you are an investigator. What you are going to do now is track and investigate. The package Kevin was supposed to bring us, containing items of crucial importance, is still within the Four.”
“How do you know that?”
Barton grimaced, and Cook answered for him. “Well, it ain’t here, is it?”
“The point is”-Barton again-“you are going to find what Kevin left behind and bring it to us.” He pointed to the laptop. “We will be watching where you go. We will watch you go south, watch you come north again. When you do, you will come here directly and hand over what you have found. If you do not do this, we will find you.” Again, he gestured to the computer. “And we will kill you.”
There was no use pretending I didn’t understand. No use asking why. Barton understood exactly what I was, exactly how this worked. I had no fingerprints. I had no permanent identity. I had the training and the resources of the United States government behind me. And of course if I was caught, if I was tortured or beaten, if I were to be murdered or sold south, then no one would miss me. No one would care. An invisible man is an expendable man.
I let my eyes rest a moment more on the blinking dot on the screen.
I turned back to Cook. “I don’t understand something here. You’re tracking me, but my handler-my boss-he’s tracking me, too. So-”
Cook started to answer, but Barton raised one hand, palm out, gesturing him to silence, as he had done to me at the Fountain Diner. Then he lowered his voice, cocked his head, and dropped into an impression of me, of someone like me, the cool, tough undercover agent calling in: “Hell of a thing,” he said, “but what I’m hearing is, this runner never made it past the Fence. He’s still down there, it looks like. If I’m gonna find him for you, that’s where I gotta go.”
I closed my eyes and nodded. This was my life; this was my destiny-to be someone’s tool, someone or other.
“When you have found what we are looking for,” added Cook, “you call and tell boss man no luck. You couldn’t find the boy.”
“Hell of a thing,” I murmured.
“Then you bring us our package,” said Barton. “And that’s it. We’re done.”
“Done?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Cook. “Done.”
This was too much for Maris. “No,” he said. “No-” but now it was his turn to be hushed by Barton’s imperious hand. “Yes,” said the priest. “Succeed in this. Make this right. And we will arrange a connecting flight to Canada for you.”
Maris stood and laid his shotgun on the ground and stomped out of the circle of chairs, took a sullen distance on the far side of the room, leaning in the doorjamb with arms crossed. Barton did not move. Kept his glowing eyes on me.
“All right,” I said. “So what am I looking for?”
“It’s a package. Small. An envelope, padded and sealed. Kevin’s instructions when he had it were to mark it on the back with his initials, so we would know it for sure. We do not know if he did that or not. But on the front it will bear the insignia of Garments of the Greater South. Do you know that insignia?”
I nodded. I knew it. I knew it from where it had been emblazoned on the collarbone of Jackdaw the slave, Kevin the sophomore. I knew it from the full file.
“So it’s a sealed envelope from GGSI. Thick envelope. Marked on the back.” Barton nodded. “But what’s inside?”
“Evidence. Powerful evidence that will bring down the very foundations of slavery.”
I almost laughed: the willful obscurantism, the curtain of mystery. “So I go down into the Four, I chase down this thing, I don’t even know what it is?”
“You will do,” said Maris from his new remove on the far side of the room, “as we have told you to do.” And for once, he and Cook were in agreement.
“Or,” said the cop, “we’ll kill ya.”
But Barton looked at me thoughtfully as he rose. “No, we’ll tell him. We will tell you. Mr. Maris and Mr. Cook, you will tell our friend how to make contact with the lawyer. And you will explain to him what it is he is recovering.” He laid his hand on my head and let it rest there a moment. “Let him understand why it matters so much that he succeed. Not just for his life but for the lives of us all.”
Barton bowed his blond head toward me. “This is a hard situation we are putting you in. But you must see it”-he emphasized the same word he had used with Kevin, that soft and powerful word, must, soft and hard at once, like a hammer wrapped in velvet-“you must see this as your opportunity to undo the evils that you have done. To put a mark in the other column. Here you can be a soldier-you can be good, my son. You can do good.”
24.
It was another hour that I sat there with the Underground Airlines, in the cold company of Mr. Maris and Willie Cook.
I was told everything I would need to know. Told me about the lawyer, where and how to find him, everything I needed to get started chasing down what Kevin had left behind.
They told me all about it, too, the shocking evidence, what was going to shake the very foundations. And I had to work hard, pretending to be impressed with it all. With the enormity of the crime, with the scandal that was to be exposed.