Alpha

Chapter Four

Gabriel Fuller hates Pooch.

He hates his boundless enthusiasm and his good-natured idiocy and his desire to chase every ball that’s thrown his way. He hates his lack of pedigree, his complete renunciation of anything that might’ve, once, harked back to his wolf ancestry. He hates the simplicity that dictates that Pooch loves Gordo and Betsy and All Kids; hates that he goes crazy when offered a bone but is nowhere allowed to piss, shit, or fuck. He hates the fact that, even after all this time, he cannot be certain if Pooch is a boy or a girl.

Every Friend who portrays a character in WilsonVille has “allowed behavior,” which is another way of saying “things you must and must not do.” Some are general rules, applicable to every employee in the park: for instance, under no circumstances are they allowed to strike a park visitor. Self-explanatory, but good to remember on days when the fifth little tyke in a row has vomited on your paws or climbed onto your back and then taken a tinkle. Some are specific to character: for instance, Lily is forbidden to remove her antlers in public view. Doing so can result in immediate dismissal for “violation of character.”

Pooch’s rules are very simple. One, Pooch is a dog. Two, as a dog, he walks on all fours. Three, as a well-trained dog, he does tricks, and he does them on command: Pooch can fetch; Pooch can hop up on his hind legs for hugs and to dance about; Pooch can walk on his forepaws for short distances, to indicate excitement or approval; and, in the ultimate hypocrisy, Pooch can sign his name.

But he has to sign with his mouth.

This means that Gabriel Fuller, wearing eighteen pounds of Pooch costume, including a headpiece that stinks of sweat and shed skin cells, spends most of his days in the park walking on all fours. And when he’s not doing that, he’s pretty much guaranteed to be walking on his hands as often as his legs, because that’s what the masses have come to see. Sometimes, Gordo gives a kid a ball, and he gets to fetch it.

Signing autographs is actually the easiest task, though it requires some balance to execute properly. The headpiece is such that control of the mouth and tongue are accomplished by a wire system in the forepaws. When signing, Gabriel Fuller takes the offered pen into his mouth, closing it, then frees one of his hands-being right-handed, his right-from the paw and moves it up his front, to the inside of the mask. In this way, he can sign his name using his hand. But this also means that, while on all fours, he has to support most of his upper body on his left hand. His upper body plus the weight of the costume. Sometimes he’ll sit on his haunches to do it, but it’s a hard posture to hold for more than thirty seconds or so at a time.

At least management understands that the costumes are physically taxing, and for every thirty minutes he spends in the park Gabriel Fuller gets to spend sixty on break. By the time he’s made it to one of the employee areas and gotten out of his headpiece and freed enough of his upper body to effectively use his hands, he has forty minutes left. He’s drenched with sweat and dying of thirst, especially if it’s been a hot day (and almost every day seems to be a hot day). He sits on a bench in one of the common areas that anchor the theme park’s tunnel system, and sometimes he gets to chat with other Friends, but most of the time he’s given a wide berth, because he reeks. The female performers, in particular, avoid him, especially the Flower Sisters.

There’s prestige in whom you’re wearing. Right now, Gordo, Pooch, and Betsy are at the bottom of the ladder, though it’s anybody’s guess who’s in last place of the three. Probably Gordo, who has steadfastly refused to grow with the times, it seems; Betsy, at least, got to move “tomboy” in the last few decades, out of her floral print dresses and into cutoffs and sneakers. For the men, though, the character to be right now is Hendar. Hendar gets marriage proposals, and sometimes Mom has been known to whisper an indecent proposal in his ear, or even slip him a hotel key card. It works in private, too, with the Friends cast as Hendar renowned for “picking up a Penny” with impressive frequency. For the women, the prestige part is a toss-up, either Agent Rose or Nova. Penny Starr’s jumpsuit is tight, of course, but Nova’s superhero outfit actually gets to show a little skin, and her costume has some cool accoutrements. Agent Rose gets the trench coat and the hat and a comedy-tragedy porcelain mask with the lips painted blood-red, and who doesn’t love a Bad Girl?

All this means that, more often than not, Gabriel Fuller is left alone when he’s not out in public, not chasing Gordo’s goddamn oversize soft foam baseball or dancing in circles around Betsy or having someone pee on his back. He’s left alone, and even if he’s wearing half a giant mutt costume, he’s often unnoticed. This suits him fine. It’s time he’s used well in the last couple weeks, mapping the service tunnels and marking the generator locations and the pump rooms and generally getting the lay of the parts of WilsonVille that sixty-plus thousand people a day don’t even pause to consider. The apparatus within the apparatus; the world that allows the park to exist.

Gabriel Fuller has been doing prep, and it’s almost complete. Gabriel Fuller has set eight charges, loaded a cache with the equipment he’ll need when it all goes down. He’s done this because it’s what the Uzbek told him to do. He’s done this because, when it all goes down, he’ll be on the inside, he’ll be running the show on the ground.

Gabriel Fuller is ready in mind, if not in heart.

Gabriel Fuller is not Gabriel Fuller’s real name.

He still doesn’t know who he works for, even after all this time, even after nearly seven years.

That was a different life ago, and a far different world from one where places like WilsonVille could even be imagined. At that time, his world was what he had been able to make of it, mostly through cunning and to a lesser extent through strength, and it had been those two traits that had brought him, before he was Gabriel Fuller and still called Matias, to the Uzbek’s attention.

They’d met at a party Matias was throwing for his crew, back in Odessa. He and his boys had brought over half a ton of raw heroin from Afghanistan the previous week, and already most of it had made its way to Moscow. Even after the bribes, the cuts, all the hands that had reached out for their share, it had been a dynamic haul, and there was reason to celebrate. Normally, Matias ran a tight ship, but this time he’d let loose the reins for one night, thrown the party himself. There was booze and cigarettes, some pot, and a lot of girls, all of them pretty and most of them young.

The Uzbek’s appearance came as a surprise; he was uninvited but not unknown. Matias had seen him a handful of times before, had heard some stories, had asked some discreet questions. The stories were broad-stroke myth, about how the Uzbek had done this thing or that thing, like how he’d cut the balls off some UN guy and fed them to him, or how he’d taken the ringleader of a gang moving black market gasoline and made him drink a gallon of the stuff, then cut him open and thrown a match. The stories backed the answers to Matias’s questions, even if the stories weren’t true; in no uncertain terms, the Uzbek was Not to Be Fucked With. Connected, he’d been told, and Matias had said something about the big players in Russia, gotten a head shake in return. Not just Moscow, no, bigger than that. Connected, you understand?

Matias didn’t, couldn’t conceive of something bigger than the power in Moscow, but he got the message, and he passed the word: his boys, they stayed the fuck out of the Uzbek’s way, out of the Uzbek’s business. Twice already, Matias had killed jobs that could’ve been lucrative, just to stay on the safe side.

So Matias’s first thought on seeing the Uzbek walk through the door in his tailored suit and his long hair and those wire-rim round-frame glasses with the tinted lenses was pretty much, Oh, fuck me running, we cut into his score. And his second thought was to wonder how quickly he could get out of the country, and how much of his money he might be able to take with him. If the Uzbek was as connected as all that, then killing him wasn’t going to help; killing him would only make things worse, and would mean Matias would be that much longer for the dying. Although he had done some dark things in his short life already, he didn’t fancy being turned into a flambe.

It was Vladimir, the biggest of his boys and not the nicest by a long shot, who came to him.

“This guy, he says he wants to talk to you.”

Matias hadn’t taken his eyes from the Uzbek since the man had arrived, watching where he stood perfectly still just inside the door to the condo, letting the pretty girls and tough boys party around him. The Uzbek watching Matias the same way Matias was watching him.

“He say what about?”

“No. He’s that guy, the one you told us-”

“I fucking know who he is.” Matias ran fingers through his hair, shot the vodka he’d been drinking down his throat, made his way over. The Uzbek didn’t move, didn’t seem to blink, and for all there was to read in his expression, Matias might as well have been illiterate. Fleetingly, Matias wondered if the Uzbek would just shoot him then and there.

But the Uzbek smiled. “Matias. We haven’t met.”

“No.”

“We should talk. There a place we can talk, without all this noise?”

“You mean alone?”

“I’m not chasing your ass cherry, Matias, you can relax.”

Maybe not literally, Matias thought, but he shrugged and led the way out of the room, through the master bedroom, where two of his boys and three of the girls were contorting themselves without clothes. Matias didn’t care, and from what he caught of the Uzbek’s reflection in the glass doors, neither did the other man. Slid the doors back, stepped out onto the balcony, into the nighttime view of Odessa, down to the Black Sea. You could see lights of the ships moving about the port, life on the waterfront. It was late spring, not cold, but not quite warm enough.

“You a trusting man, Matias?” The Uzbek indicated the drop.

“You want me dead, I’m dead.” Matias shrugged, much as he had before, but he liked the fact that the Uzbek had called him a man. That was something he normally had to fight for.

But the Uzbek undercut it immediately. “How old are you?”

Matias felt the tension race up his back, felt the fleeting satisfaction vanishing. “Twenty.”

The Uzbek shook his head, leaned forward on the railing, and knocked a cigarette from its pack into his hand. He made fire from a lighter, paused before touching it to the tobacco. “You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Then that’s a pity.”

“Why?”

A plume of smoke. “We thought you were younger. You look younger. We thought maybe sixteen, seventeen.”

“You like boys.”

The Uzbek exhaled, watched his smoke disappear into the night air. If Matias’s implication had offended or annoyed or even registered, he couldn’t tell.

“We like potential,” the Uzbek said. “But twenty, Matias…that’s too old, I’m afraid.”

“So maybe I’m not twenty.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe sixteen, that’s true.”

“Sure. And you’ve been running your crew, what, four years?”

Matias nodded, thinking that the Uzbek already knew the answers to the questions he was asking; thinking that the Uzbek maybe wasn’t here to kill him, and if not, now wondering just what the fuck this player wanted. He was sensitive about his age with good reason, had needed to fight, even kill people who thought his youth meant he was unworthy of their respect. It was how he’d started, smuggling cigarettes, and Old Grigori had come to him and told him to cut him in or he’d get cut, cut and left to bleed out. Grigori, fifty years old, who hadn’t caught up to the times, and the next day Matias had gone to him under the pretense of bringing tribute, and instead used a tire iron to modify their arrangement. When that was done, Grigori had more gray matter outside than in, and what had been his now belonged to Matias, including his crew, including his customers.

He’d been twelve then.

So now, sixteen-or maybe seventeen, he really wasn’t sure-and he didn’t know what he was feeling. Felt his brow furrowing as he searched out the emotion, and all the while the Uzbek kept his silence, smoking his cigarette and apparently in no hurry to explain himself. It took some digging before Matias found the name to what he was feeling, realized he was curious. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that.

“So sixteen is good?”

The Uzbek nodded.

“What is sixteen good for?”

Flicking the cigarette away, watching the ember spark orange in the sky until it vanished. “Because we can make something out of you.”

Then the Uzbek explained what that meant.

Still no names, no explanations beyond the most basic. Yes, this meant Matias was part of the same organization, the same machine, that the Uzbek served. Yes, that meant the same protections, the same benefits. Money, sure; comfort, absolutely; respect, that would be earned, but already Matias had respect, enough respect that they would come to him with this offer.

There is a man, the Uzbek told Matias, a man who lives in shadow, a man whose name you will never know. But this man has noticed you, Matias. He likes what he’s seen of you, what he’s heard. He likes that you’re not some brat who thinks a pistol makes him a king, who thinks God is a bullet. Too many fucking kids, they work their muscle, not their mind, and thugs, hell, thugs are cheap, thugs are easy. Thugs are a dime a dozen, right? But this man, Matias, he likes that you can move a half ton of heroin a thousand miles and do it right, without fucking it up, without getting greedy or turning stupid. He likes that you’ve been smart enough to stay out of our way, and he likes that you’re not some broken psycho fuck. You’re not a broken psycho fuck, are you, Matias? We’re not going to find some dog bones under your bed and DVDs of you fucking their entrails, nothing like that?

“Nothing like that.”

What he likes, Matias, is that you have that rarest of combinations found in youth; ambition and restraint. That means you’re a thinker, and that maybe even you’re smart. He calls this potential. Awesome potential.

This man whose name you will never know, he has reach, the Uzbek said, and his reach is increasing. He has a vision and a plan, and someone like you would be welcome within it. Follow instructions, do as you’re told, keep being smart, and it will pay dividends, big dividends. It will make Odessa a memory, and will pave your future with gold.

“What do I have to do?” Matias asked.

“You have to go to school,” the Uzbek said.

It was almost a year later that he arrived in Los Angeles. He traveled under a false name, he couldn’t even remember it now if he tried, because as soon as he arrived, it was done, literally burned. The Uzbek had arranged a condo for him, and a car, and he was enrolled in the community college, and his name was Gabriel Fuller, and he was an American, though his mother had been from Ukraine. He had a bank account and a stipend and papers for everything, and the instructions were simple enough, as they were with Pooch.

One, he was to stay clean. No drugs, no guns, nothing that would make the law look at him twice. Be clean and stay clean, no record, and this was vital, the Uzbek said. No speeding tickets, nothing.

Second, get that language, and get rid of that accent. Know your American, so you can be American.

Third, take the courses at the college, meet the people, blend in. Take whatever you want, but if maybe some sciences are in there, that wouldn’t be bad, you know? Maybe some math and some physics, too, because the more you know, the more useful to us you become, and the more useful, the more respect, the more the reward.

The day his papers said he’d turned eighteen, he received an e-mail from the Uzbek. In truth, Matias had celebrated-a poor word for letting the day pass without note-what he suspected was the date almost six months prior. But on Gabriel Fuller’s eighteenth birthday, at least, there came this e-mail, sent through the anonymous account Matias checked every day, which, for almost a year, had remained empty. So it took him by surprise when he saw the letter, read it, and it was so simple, and he began to truly understand what they were after.

Happy Birthday, Gabriel.

Time to serve your country. Army or marines.

One term of service will be fine.

He went with the army, signed on for the 4YO, four-year obligation, took the training and the pay, regular infantry, learned the weapons and the tactics and found himself in Afghanistan once again, and there were times during that deployment that he wondered if this had been a good idea or not. Moments when his unit was taking fire, when his friends died. They were his friends, truly, because he was Gabriel Fuller, and even if he had only been pretending, those bastards trying to kill them sure as hell were using real bullets and rockets and grenades.

He was Gabriel Fuller, and he was a soldier in the army of the United States of America, and he didn’t need the Uzbek to tell him why he was doing this. Free training from the most advanced, best fighting force anywhere in the world.

He could see how that might be useful.

He was out after his second tour, had made himself a specialist before departing, and the army wanted him to stay. But the Uzbek, who had been silent since wishing him happy birthday so long ago, reached out again, and said that was enough. Perhaps he might want to explore what the GI Bill had to offer?

Perhaps he might like to pursue a degree in engineering, in fact? Or economics? Or chemistry?

His fifth semester at UCLA, he and some friends had gone to the movies in Westwood, seen a film about this chick who was wrongly accused of being a spy. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the movie, because among the friends was this girl, Dana, and he thought maybe she liked him the way he liked her, and about minute forty he discovered that she did. So he missed most of the film, instead tasting her mouth and letting her taste his, and it wasn’t really until the next morning, when they parted and he was heading to class, that he found himself thinking at all about what he’d seen, what he’d heard while lost in the taste and touch and feel of Dana.

A sleeper agent, someone on the screen had said. A long-term sleeper agent, placed and forgotten, known to no one. Until the day comes, the call arrives, and the sleeper is activated. Until the sleeper awakens.

It stopped him, standing just outside of Royce Hall, and he felt like a fucking idiot.

That’s me, he thought. I’m a sleeper, and I don’t know who for, or why, or what, or when I’m going to wake up.

And it occurred to him then that if this was his dream, if he was asleep, as sweet as this dream had become, it would end. He would wake. When the time came, he would wake, and he wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.

He would wake, whether he wanted to or not.

The Uzbek contacted him in late winter, the same way he had every time before.

I am coming for a visit in the spring, to talk about your summer job.

Dana was studying special education, working with the developmentally and physically disabled, and she was making summer plans along those lines. But she wanted them to spend the summer together, and so she asked what he was going to do, and even though Gabriel knew he shouldn’t, he told her the truth.

“I’m working at WilsonVille,” he said. He had applied immediately after the Uzbek’s visit, as instructed, had already received word that his security screening had been approved. He was due to attend his first orientation and training seminar that weekend.

She laughed, then, thought he was joking. Saw from his look that he wasn’t. “Seriously?”

“Already applied and was accepted.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever they’ll let me.” He shrugged. “Probably picking up garbage. What about you?”

“I was thinking about going home. There’s this camp for the deaf I used to volunteer at, I was going to work there.” Her family was from Illinois, outside of Chicago someplace. They were talking in her dorm room, and she looked at him thoughtfully for a couple of seconds after saying that. Then reached over to the foot of her bed. A small collection of stuffed animals resided there, would inevitably end up on the floor whenever they made love. She picked up one of them, a sweet-looking gazelle.

“But now I’m thinking maybe not,” Dana said. She was still holding the animal, one index finger slowly stroking its breast up and down as she looked at him. The curl of her lip formed a slight smile as she met his eyes, and the gesture had nothing to do with the little gazelle in her hands. The thrill it gave Gabriel took him by surprise, made him want her right then and right there.

“We could get our own place,” she said. “Just for the summer, you and me.”

And despite everything the Uzbek had said, despite everything he already knew and everything he was beginning to suspect, Gabriel Fuller nodded. The Uzbek would give him hell when he found out, of course. The Uzbek wouldn’t like it.

But the Uzbek, Gabriel Fuller thought, had never been in love.

“I’d like that,” he said.