Dominion

NINETEEN

Ruppert awoke to the scratchy, hiss-filled melody of Billie Holiday singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” on the record player. He nudged aside the paper screen and joined Lucia and Dr. Smith in the living room area, where Lucia was eating spinach from a can. Smith sat in a threadbare recliner and tinkering with the back of a bulky screen mounted atop an easel.

“More water, more batteries,” Smith was saying. “I can’t have too much of either.”

“I’ll let someone know,” Lucia said. “What about food?”

“I’ve got more than enough to last the rest of my life.” Smith scratched at his beard and looked at Ruppert. “How’s my patient? Swelling? Discomfort?”

“I feel fine,” Ruppert said. “Actually, I haven’t slept that well in years.”

“Have some breakfast.” Lucia handed him a rectangle of metal fitted with a pull tab.

“Sardines?” Ruppert asked. He peeled back the lid to see a dark orange mass under a layer of thick oil.

“Tinned cheese,” Lucia said.

“Can they do that with cheese?”

“They did it. Dig in.” She handed him a spoon.

Ruppert scooped out some of the mushy cheese material, but before he put it in his mouth, he tilted the spoon to let the oil spill back into the tin. The cheese tasted rank and had a slimy texture-it seemed to wriggle around his teeth as he tried to chew it.

“Good?” Lucia asked.

Ruppert forced himself to swallow. “Sure. Thanks.”

She shook her head. “It’s foul.”

“Then why do you get spinach?” Ruppert asked.

"You think it's any better?"

“Don’t tell me you hate the cheese, too.” Dr. Smith leaned over, scooped out some of the cheese with his own spoon, slurped it down. “What’s wrong with that?”

Ruppert slid the tin across the table, closer to Dr. Smith.

“What are you doing here?” Ruppert nodded at the bulky easel screen.

“It’s just a focusing device,” Smith said. “You may not be out of Terror’s pocket yet. We’ll need to check you for programming.”

“You think I'm a computer?"

“Your brain is,” Lucia said. “And they know how to install controls. And if they took you long enough to put in a tracking device…”

“We’re not blaming you if they did,” Smith added. “It’s a necessary precaution on our part. Terror runs all kinds of strange games, and we have to be careful.”

Ruppert looked at the blank screen. “You told me you were involved in creating the PSYCOM.”

“I was one of the first psychos,” Smith said. “That’s what we called ourselves.”

“Why did you change your mind?” Ruppert asked.

“You mean, why did I abandon wealth, influence, and an intimate knowledge of the world’s greatest secrets in exchange for a hole in the ground?”

“Seems like a reasonable question,” Ruppert said.

“Only the poor and the animals are free. George Orwell," Smith said. "My old life involved power, duty, secrecy. Now I am free."

“What changed your mind?” Ruppert asked.

“When I saw our designs unfolding in the real world,” Smith said. “Prior to that, it felt like an abstract intellectual exercise-how to theoretically attain full-spectrum psychological dominion…if one wanted. After Columbus, I watched things we had discussed in comfortable chairs at a conference table begin to unfold, the whole architecture imposed from the top down-the Emergency Detention Centers, the Department of Faith, and of course Terror. When those awful Freedom Brigades began their rampages, burning down neighborhoods and shooting people in the streets, that’s when I left.”

“You just quit?”

“I wish I could have.” Smith chuckled. “No, death was the only way out for me. So I engineered that. Or an illusion of it, as you can see." Smith glanced down to the cheese tin. He had eaten most of the contents. “I apologize. Have the last piece.”

“It’s all yours,” Ruppert said.

“I like it better here,” Smith said. “I can grow out my hair like some kind of radical. And there’s time to read. I never had that before. I’m even writing a book on PSYCOM and its programs, so maybe that will be of some service to the country. It won’t be available in bookstores, naturally.”

“There are plenty of ways to get information around,” Lucia said.

“Which brings us back to Mr. Ruppert’s purpose here.” Smith tilted the easel screen so that it faced Ruppert directly. “I will need to place you into a hypnotic trance. If I were still a psycho, I would use drugs to help things along, but I would rather you remember this as clearly as possible. My only purpose is to seek out any secret instructions and to help you remove them.”

“I did receive secret instructions,” Ruppert said.

“Excuse me?” Smith asked.

Ruppert told them about his capture and detention by Terror. “They wanted me to go looking for this guy, this crazy neo-Nazi guy, named Hollis Westerly-”

“Shit,” Lucia said.

Smith held up his hand. “Go on.”

“-they said Sully’s friend might lead me to him for some reason. They wanted me to contact them as soon as I had the guy’s location.”

“This is blown,” Lucia said. A knife with a black, glassy blade appeared in her hand-Ruppert could not tell where it had been sheathed. She sprang from her chair, the blade high. Ruppert drew back and put up his hands, ready to fend her off.

“Wait.” Smith touched her arm, and she relaxed, but remained standing. Her mouth was a hard, flat line, and her black eyes burned at Ruppert.

“How were you to contact Terror?” Smith asked him.

“My wallet.” Smith touched his empty pocket. “Which I left on the front steps of my house.”

“He’s a spy,” Lucia said. “I should cut his throat and bury his body in the desert. I’ve been wanting to do it for the last two years.”

“Lucia’s not a fan of my news program,” Ruppert explained to Smith.

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” Smith said. “Mr. Ruppert, thank you for telling me this. It’s going to save time. What else did they want you to do?”

“That’s it,” Ruppert said. “Just the Westerly guy. I didn’t want to help them, but they said they’d send us to labor camps, send Madeline to work at that meltdown site in Texas-”

“And if you helped out, you get to keep on living the good life, because you’re one of their guys. Right?” Lucia asked.

“If they thought I was one of them, they wouldn’t have tortured and threatened me,” Ruppert said. “You’ve seen the scars on my hands.”

“Could be fake,” she said.

“Check them out.”

“Could be real but you agreed to it, and they doped you on painkillers first.”

“If I was that dedicated, why would I be telling you now?”

“He was going to put you under,” Lucia said.

“Without drugs,” Smith pointed out. “It would require his cooperation.”

“Then maybe you should use the drugs,” Lucia said. Her eyes had narrowed as she examined Ruppert. “Just to be safe.”

“Fine with me,” Ruppert snapped back at her. “I’ll take the drugs.”

“Both of you need to calm down,” Smith said. “So far as I understand, I am the only certified medical doctor in this room, and I will make the medical decisions. Now. I don’t think it will be necessary to drug you, Daniel. I believe you wish to cooperate in removing any directives Terror may have planted within your mind. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” Ruppert said. He and Lucia continued glaring at each other.

“Lucia, avoid agitating him. It creates more work for me.”

Lucia stalked away towards a shelf crammed with magazines.

“Make yourself comfortable, Daniel,” Smith said. “Ease back in your chair.” He activated the easel screen. A constellation of electronic dots appeared, then slowly faded into another arrangement of dots, and then another.

“Now, keep your eyes on the screen, and allow yourself to relax,” Smith said. “I am going to count down from ten to one, and you will grow increasingly calm, clear, and relaxed. Ten, relaxing now…nine…”

The dots on the screen continued to fade in and out of existence, and the constellations fell into repeating patterns. Ruppert felt his eyelids dropping, and his body seemed to grow heavy. It was actually a very soothing experience, as if he were on the edge of sleep and momentarily forgetting his worry and fear…

“Now,” Smith’s voice said. Ruppert could not see him anymore. He supposed his eyes had closed, though he could still see dim afterimages of the slowly shifting dots. “We will look at a few of your memories. You will experience these like video files playing on a large screen. You will have full power to reverse, advance, pause, or stop any memory. The choice is yours. Do you understand?”

“Sure, doc.” Ruppert’s voice drawled out thick and slow.

“We are going back to the time when you were in the custody of the Department of Terror.”

A barrage of jagged, disconnected images assaulted Ruppert. Armed men in black masks raiding his home. The burning of his hands, the Captain electrocuting him, the guards beating him. A scream rose in his throat.

“Remember,” Smith said, in a voice that was calm and reassuring and seemed to glow with kindness. “These are just old videos. You have complete power over them. You are perfectly safe.”

“Okay,” Ruppert said.

“Good. Now, Daniel, we are looking for the secret conversations, the ones they told you never to remember.”

Ruppert slumped in his chair in the interrogation room, his wrists and ankles strapped into place, facing the cold blue eyes of the Captain across the table. There was something wrong with Ruppert’s arm. A needle. They’d inserted an IV into the inner crook of his elbow, and cold fluid dripped in through it, his arm aching as the coldness spread through it.

“You will remember none of this,” the Captain said. “You would rather hurt yourself than remember-”

A rush of bad memories filled Ruppert’s mind, apparently selected on the basis of their ability to stir emotional trauma. Eight years old, kneeling in the street in front of his parents’ house in Bakersfield, his black lab Guppy sprawled on the asphalt in front of his neighbor’s SUV. Ten years old, peering down at his grandfather’s body in a casket while his mother wept beside him. Ruppert heard a man screaming across a long distance.

"Now, steady yourself,” Smith’s voice said. “Nothing can hurt you now. You are free of these things. You are at peace now.”

The avalanche of painful memories began to ebb. Ruppert actually did feel better now, as if Smith’s voice had the power to make things real just by saying them. He was free of these things.

“Let’s try again,” Smith said. “We’re back in the interrogation room-”

And Ruppert was. A scorching pain flared in his muscles and in the cores of his bones. He twisted in the interrogation, but there was no escape.

“You will remember nothing,” the Captain said again, through grinding teeth. The Captain looked less human somehow, as if a dark supernatural force inhabited his body. The shadows across his face were longer and deeper, and his blue eyes looked as unfeeling as painted rocks. “Nothing…you will not remember…”

Ruppert’s eyes fixed on the skull-and-bones pin on the Captain’s uniform, the insignia of Terror. The silver skull grew to fill his entire vision. The crossbones broke at right angles to form a swastika, and it began to rotate counterclockwise, giving the impression of a spiral.

The swastika began to multiply, filling him with horror. He saw them everywhere, made of bones or painted in blood, thousands of them now and they brought dread and terror with them because he knew what they meant he knew deep deep down that the devil could make itself real in the world and it could hide behind any symbol, any flag, any words, and you might not even know it was there until it had done its evil and moved on-

“You,” the Captain snarled, and with each word he spoke, a fiery stab of electricity seared Ruppert inside and out. “Will. Remember. Nothing.” That wasn’t how it had really gone, but that was how it was going now, with Dr. Smith and the Captain wrestling for Ruppert’s mind, the Doctor outside him, the Captain within.

The thousands of swastikas crunched back together and assembled like puzzle pieces into the shape of Hollis Westerly, a big hulking man with a balding mullet-style haircut and strange tattoos along his hairy arms, Ruppert read the words on one and the words said “Odin Rising” but they didn’t mean anything to him.

Ruppert was in a dark place facing Westerly, who was not a pic or a hologram now but an incarnate person. The Captain stood in the deep shadows behind Ruppert and whispered in his ear.

“He’s a wicked man,” the Captain said. “Just look at him.”

“Wicked,” Ruppert agreed.

“He shouldn’t be allowed to live.”

“No, he shouldn’t.”

“Look around and see what you can use,” the Captain said.

Ruppert looked, but there was only darkness.

“A gun, a knife, anything,” the Captain said. At his words, both a revolver and a dagger appeared, floating in the void nearby. Ruppert plucked the knife out of the air.

“Make sure his throat is cut,” the Captain said. “Remove his tongue if you can. Don’t leave him alive. There is nothing more important this.”

“Yes.” Ruppert stepped towards Westerly, lifted the blade, and skewered the neo-Nazi’s throat.

“Good boy,” the Captain said.

Ruppert blinked, unsure where he was. His empty hand was extended out in front of him, as if reaching for something.

“What?” he asked, as if someone had spoken to him.

“And you’re awake,” Dr. Smith replied. The room suddenly made sense. He was in a cave in the desert. The old doctor occupied a recliner just behind and to the left of Ruppert.

“You snapped out of it,” Smith told him. “You woke yourself. What do you remember?”

Flashbacks of his torture experience skittered across Ruppert’s vision, along with, oddly, the image of his pet dog from childhood.

“Guppy was a great dog,” Ruppert said.

“Excuse me?” Smith asked.

“Nothing. What happened?”

“I’d hoped you would remember,” Smith said. “We’ll have to repeat this process. Twice a day until you remember everything.”

“What am I supposed to remember?” Ruppert asked.

“That you’re a hit man,” Lucia said.

Ruppert looked at her with disbelief.

“I’m just as shocked as you,” she said. “You’d think they could find someone more qualified.”

“Is she serious?” Ruppert asked the doctor.

“Yes, and far more so than I believe healthy,” Smith said. “But that is beside the point. Daniel, they programmed you to kill a man, if that word can be applied to Hollis Westerly.”

“They want me to kill the Nazi guy?” Ruppert blinked several times. He felt like his brain was stuttering. “But is that really so bad? I mean, he’s a wicked man. Just look at him.”

“The exact words spoken by your programmer,” Smith said.

“Who was it? The Captain?”

“That is how you referred to him.”

“They’ve got the whole thing figured out,” Lucia said. “We can’t do this. We should eliminate him.”

Ruppert understood the “him” to mean him.

“Not necessarily,” Dr. Smith said. “We have many advantages here.”

“Like what?” Lucia snapped. She stalked back across the room, still holding an unopened issue of Architectural Digest in one hand. “They know everything.”

“No,” Dr. Smith said. “They want to give the impression of omniscience. Don’t buy into their image. And, please, try to relax for one minute. Or even an entire hour. Would you like me to hypnotize you?”

“Forget it.”

“The first thing we have,” Smith said, “Is their assassin working with us. You are still working with us, correct, Daniel?”

“If Lucia doesn’t kill me first,” Ruppert said.

She scowled at him and flipped open her magazine.

“The second thing we have is knowledge of their intentions,” Smith said. “What can we deduce, Lucia? Consider it from a counterintelligence perspective.”

“Fuck.” Lucia sighed and slapped the magazine closed. “All right. So the psychos program Danny boy here to kill Westerly. We know why.”

“Why?” Ruppert asked.

“Later,” Smith said. “Lucia, why program an assassin? Are they lacking in hired killers?”

“No, they’ve got plenty of those,” Lucia said. “Usually it’s because they want to keep their hands clean, right? Like if they assassinate a prime minister or president somewhere.”

Smith nodded. “But…”

“But Hollis Westerly is not rich or famous or powerful,” Lucia said. “He’s about as nobody as you can get.”

“So why not just send in the Terror men, or a Freedom Brigade? Or even a couple of Hartwell cops, in a pinch?”

“Because…they sent in this guy as poisoned bait instead. So we’d take him to Westerly ourselves. And that means…” Lucia bit at her lip for a moment, then broke into a smile. “They don’t know where Westerly is. They must not have a clue, if they’re going to this much trouble.”

“That’s the only reason I can see,” Smith said. “If they just wanted him dead and they knew where he was, they would just send someone after him. And we know they just want him dead. So…”

“Did I mention yet that I wanted to know why the psychos are trying to kill Westerly?” Ruppert asked, but nobody seemed inclined to answer him.

“So we’re still on course, aren’t we?” Lucia asked.

“For the moment,” Smith agreed.