Dominion

FIFTEEN

The room was gleaming white and extremely long, like a corridor stretching away into eternity. Ruppert sat alone in a chair. He had the impression that the room extended a long way behind him, but he did not turn to look.

Far in front of him, though it was difficult to judge distance in any meaningful sense, George Baldwin sat behind his black slab of a desk, which had somehow been transported into this strange, elongated room.

Ruppert felt comfortable and relaxed. He felt good. There were no secrets here, nothing to hide. He could get up and leave anytime he wanted. He was so sure of this that he had no need to prove it.

“You met him at Nixon Stadium?” Baldwin asked. His tone was pleasant and friendly.

“Yes.”

“What was his name?”

“He never said.”

“Describe him.”

Ruppert painted a verbal portrait of the young man in the green Packers jersey, noting the hazel color of his eyes, the slightly snubby nose, the ragged tennis shoes the man had worn. He mind functioned with extreme clarity, offering pristine, photographic memories.

As he spoke, Ruppert noticed dark, smoky curls wavering in and out of the space next to Baldwin, forming a suggestion of a shape, something like another man in an all-black suit like Baldwin’s.

“Who’s there with you, George?” Ruppert asked.

“Nobody’s here, Daniel. It’s just you and me.” At Baldwin’s words, the dark traces hovering beside him vanished. “What did the man in the Packers jersey say to you?”

“He had a secret to share.” Ruppert’s voice dropped to a childish whisper.

“What kind of secret?” Baldwin leaned forward, smiling, eager to play along. They were just boys playing war games.

“No, no,” Ruppert wagged his finger. “Not for me, not yet.”

“For who, then?”

“For the world. The whole, wide world.” Ruppert cocked his head, half-remembering something important about his pal Georgie. “You’ve been playing a bad, bad game.”

“I have? Not me, Daniel. You know you can trust me.”

“You broke the rules. He wants me to call no fair how you broke the rules. Naughty, naughty.”

“What precisely did he want you to tell the world, Daniel?”

Ruppert dropped into his childish whisper again. “It’s a big huge secret. It’s too big for me to know yet.”

“That’s interesting, Daniel.” Baldwin reclined back in his ergonomic chair. “So what are you supposed to do now?”

“I wait for him to call me. Then we go and play.” Ruppert held out empty hands, palms up. “That’s all I know, Georgie.”

Baldwin turned and spoke in a low voice to the empty space where the other Terror man wasn’t standing, wasn’t there at all because it was just Ruppert and Georgie in the room. Ruppert could hear Baldwin’s words but not understand them, as if they entered his ears tilted at the wrong angle. Baldwin nodded, then turned back to Ruppert.

“That’s fine, Daniel. What you’re going to do is play along with him for now. It’s going to be a fun game, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Georgie.”

“Play along until it’s time to do what I told you. You remember what I told you to do, right, Daniel? What we talked about before?”

“I remember.”

“Good boy! You’ll be a good secret agent, won’t you, Daniel?”

“I am!”

“Now you have to forget this whole conversation. You’ll do what I said, but you won’t remember we ever talked about it. Right?”

“Yes, George.”

“Now, we’re counting up. Listen to my voice. One…two…three…”

“Are you still here, Daniel?”

Ruppert started at his desk. He’d been…what? Sleeping? Daydreaming? He glanced down to see a half-played game of solitaire floating on the digital surface of his desk. Amanda Greene stood at the door to his office, a puzzled look on her face.

“Amanda Greene,” he said. “With the weather.”

“Yeah…Are you feeling okay? It’s almost seven o’ clock. I’ve never seen you work this late.”

“Oh. Do you work this late?”

“Sometimes.” Amanda stepped closer to his desk. “You don’t look right, Daniel. Should I call your wife for you?”

“Yeah. No! There’s no reason. I’m just here.” Ruppert glanced at his desk calendar, which minimized to the size of a postage stamp when he wasn’t looking at it. The desk sensed his interest, and the calendar expanded until he could see the highlighted box representing today. It was Monday. “Just working.”

Amanda glanced out towards the hall, then whispered, “I saw you go into Baldwin’s office after the show. Is something going on around here?”

“Baldwin?”

Amanda raised her eyebrows and nodded in the general direction of Baldwin’s office.

“Oh,” Ruppert said. “Oh. George Baldwin. Nope, I haven’t seen him today. Was he here?”

Amanda’s brow crinkled, and she frowned at him. “Sure. All right. Good night, Daniel.”

“Night.”

Ruppert’s chair creaked as he leaned back. He remembered doing the newscast, even remembered that the main story centered on the pursuit of Sheik Muhammad al Taba, whose terrorist militia might have fled from Egypt, possibly as far as Addis Abbaba. The Hartwell Services contractor army might just have to follow. News reports had downgraded al Taba’s vast army to a small but intensely radical militia, though this downgrade had not been acknowledged or explained in any way to the public.

So he’d finished doing the report, and then…he must have come into his office. He must have been reading, or…playing solitaire, and dozed off. Something about this didn’t fit right, but he couldn’t identify exactly what it was.

Ruppert left his office, the lights dimming automatically behind him, and headed for the elevator. There was nobody left on his floor, as far as he could tell. He was accustomed to assistants whirling through the hallways bearing urgent messages, technicians with carts of equipment, visiting executives. The silence and emptiness unnerved him.

“Down,” he said to the elevator. He looked along the intersecting corridor toward the black glass of Baldwin’s office. If he walked down there, would he find Baldwin still inside? The idea that he might be alone with the Terror man bothered him even more than the after-hours silence.

When his elevator arrived, he jabbed the LOBBY button with his thumb, and kept jabbing it until the elevator doors had closed.

?

Ruppert arrived home to find Madeline on her hands and knees in the kitchen, furiously scrubbing bleach into the white tiles with a hard-bristled brush. Her hair hung in sweaty tails around her eyes, and her skin had an unusual, feverish glow. Rags, sponges, and more cleaning fluids and sponges were scattered across the granite kitchen counter, as if a maintenance crew had exploded inside their house.

“Madeline?” he said.

She looked up at him, her teeth bared, her lips locked into a smile under unnaturally wide and bright eyes.

“I quit my job,” she announced.

“You put in your notice?”

“I walked.” She turned her brush on its end to scrape the grout between two tiles. “I couldn’t take those dirty brats any more. I’ve done my part for other people’s kids. I want to focus on mine from now on. You make enough money.”

“Sure, if that’s what you want. But why…” He indicated the mess of cleaning fluids on the counter. “Didn’t Tiffany come today?” Tiffany was their regular housekeeper, a great slab of a woman in her late fifties.

“It’s not clean enough. We need it clean for the baby.”

Ruppert nodded and decided it might be best not to pursue the question. The church doctor had been injecting her with fertility hormones, a common necessity for couples who wanted to conceive. When he was younger, Ruppert had read about toxic pollution in the air and water, possibly interfering with fertility, but that kind of news had vanished.

“We have to be very clean from now on,” Madeline continued. “If we’re going to do these dirty things in the bedroom, the rest of the house should be extra clean.”

Ruppert mumbled an agreement with this logic and stepped around to take a bottle of Canadian water from the refrigerator, which also reeked of bleach. He watched her a moment longer as she scrubbed a floor that had remained spotless as long as they’d inhabited this house. He could not imagine conceiving a child at this point in their lives, when his own future remained in question. If he went along with Sully’s friends, he’d have to spend the rest of his life in hiding. Cooperating with Terror was no guarantee of security, either-once they had what they wanted, he would become an inconvenient detail to eliminate. They’d already targeted him for dissidence. Why keep him alive once he’d served his purpose?

He continued up to the bedroom, where he did as the Packers fan had instructed him. He packed his suitcase with several changes of clothes, a toiletry kit, an envelope of cash he’d drawn from the ATM. The Packers fan had told him to make a small withdrawal each day, no more than a couple thousand dollars at a time, because taking a big piece out of his spending account would trigger an alert at the bank.

He finished packing the suitcase, then wondered where to hide it. He decided plain sight was best, especially with Madeline’s new obsession with cleanliness and order. He returned it to the closet from which he’d taken it, taking pains to line it up perfectly with Madeline’s empty suitcase. In her bizarre psychological state, she might notice if the suitcases were even an inch out of line with each other.

Madeline cleaned for the rest of the day, washing the walls, vacuuming, scrubbing out faucets with a toothbrush, vacuuming the same carpets a second time, dusting-he felt exhausted each time he saw her. He sat in the living room and tried to watch something soothing on the wall, an old documentary about the Serengeti, but she insisted on vacuuming out the sofa and then rubbing some kind of foaming cleaner into the upholstery.

He retreated to his upstairs office. She was still cleaning when he went to sleep.