Upon A Pale Horse

EIGHTEEN Them

In spite of it being a moderate sixty-nine degrees in the condo, Jeffrey’s forehead broke into a sweat as he reread the missive, a deep sense of dread creeping through him at the obvious — that his brother had known he might be killed, that he knew who was trying to kill him. Part of him rejected the notion that Keith had been murdered, and then his world tilted when he recalled how his brother had died — with an entire jet full of people.

If someone had really killed him, they’d blown a jetliner out of the sky.

Jeffrey closed his eyes and confirmed that the account number, bank name, and the professor’s name appeared clearly in his memory. He stood, shifting the guitar onto the cushion next to him, and headed into the kitchen. He opened a drawer and found a lighter next to some black-out candles and woodenly lit the note as instructed, then dropped the flaming paper into the sink and watched it crinkle into gray ash. After running the water and rinsing the evidence down the garbage disposal, he returned to the guitar and spliced the wires back together with a twist of each one, not bothering to solder them, but instead reassembling the faceplate and securing it with the screws, his mind racing.

What Keith had suggested was impossible; and yet he was dead. In a time of heightened security and rampant paranoia, a plane had been incinerated as easily as Keith’s note, and nobody was the wiser. He’d followed the news on the investigation as recently as that morning at work, and the prevailing official theory was that a fuel tank had somehow received a stray electric charge and ignited, causing an instantaneous chain reaction and a massive explosion.

Except that he now had an assertion that the explanation was a farce. That the destruction was apparently deliberate, targeted, and that whoever had engineered it had seen no problem with killing hundreds in order to get one man.

His brother.

Who apparently either knew about, or had stumbled across, some kind of scheme that was so big it would change the world.

A chill ran up his spine as he processed the rest of the information — which implied that whoever had killed his brother not only had the power to mount a successful cover-up of the true cause of the plane explosion, but could apparently also mount surveillance on him — simply because he was Keith’s brother.

There weren’t too many organizations that could blow a jet to dust and get away with it, and that had the capacity to bug everything in Jeffrey’s universe. He could only think of one. The government. Which was unbelievable. The U.S. didn’t go around blowing up its citizens.

Did it?

If that speculation was correct, Jeffrey was being asked from the grave to take on the most powerful entity in the world. To stop… what, he didn’t even know. How he was expected to do it, he also didn’t know. But his brother had written the note, which meant that he’d believed it was possible — Keith was no idiot, and had been a strategic thinker in the purest sense of the word. So he’d seen some way to avert this supposed catastrophe, and had died trying. And had now passed the burden to Jeffrey.

He reattached the strings while he teetered on the brink of full-scale panic, outwardly calm but in reality skittering along a razor’s edge of delirium. In a blinding instant, he’d gone from being the luckiest man in the world to one of the damned, burdened with knowledge that was impossible… and yet which had to be true.

Jeffrey tried to slow his thoughts. Mechanically he tuned the guitar, mainly to occupy his hands so he wouldn’t run screaming from the room. He strummed a series of chords and then put the guitar back on the stand, the message’s implications still slamming into him as he tried to cope.

If he assumed it was actually true, he was screwed. Worse than screwed. His brother’s death was all the proof of that conclusion he needed. If they, whoever they specifically were, had been willing to kill Keith and the rest of the innocents, why would they stop at killing him too? Why hadn’t they already killed him, just to be safe?

The answer popped into his head with a certitude that rocked him. Because he didn’t know anything, and they didn’t want to arouse any more suspicion. Or alternatively, because they thought he might know something, but had no idea how much, or who else he might have told.

His brother’s words seemed like a taunt. Trust no one. Everything is bugged.

Which was insane. A lunatic’s conspiracy theory seeped in paranoia and delusion.

Except for the plane.

And… Becky?

Someone seemingly unconnected to anything, but who was the most intimately connected in Keith’s life. The most likely to know something, to have been told something.

Also dead within days of the crash.

Coincidence?

The news of the hit-and-run was suddenly more ominous than a simple accident, one of countless that occurred around the country every week.

Had she been killed to silence her? To end any trail?

If that was even possibly true, then it had likely been Jeffrey’s own distance from Keith, his lack of communication with him, that had spared his life so far. He was the brother out on the coast, who barely talked to Keith once every six months, and then invariably by email, the minimum contact possible for two very busy young men.

Jeffrey’s rational mind grappled with the possibilities the note had raised. A part of him calmed down and looked at things logically. His brother had been acting increasingly erratically. His behavior had changed, and he’d been obsessing over dead cows.

A far more likely explanation than one where the government was blowing up planes was that his brother had been losing his mind. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate, that made more sense. Maybe he’d been doing drugs. Jeffrey knew so little about Keith’s life in the past few years, anything was possible.

And that note had been written by someone extremely paranoid. The big question was whether the paranoia was justified, or was that of a mind slowly coming apart, slipping into delusion.

It was obvious that Jeffrey had only two choices: to reject the notions and assume it was the disturbed ramblings of a man losing touch with reality, or to assume that it was the truth, and be suddenly plunged into a world that he didn’t want to believe existed. One where a ruthless, shadowy government killed at will, butchering as many as it took, and then contrived explanations and railroaded their captive experts and the compliant media into parroting whatever party line it contrived, no matter how implausible.

He’d never been much for conspiracies. He’d ignored the ongoing speculation about damning questions from prior disasters, attributing it to the disturbed inventions of unbalanced minds. Years ago, when Pan Am flight 103, en route from London to New York, blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard as well as people on the ground, he vaguely remembered some chatter about a group of CIA agents returning to the U.S. on the flight with evidence of a drug trafficking ring in the agency. And hadn’t there been numerous reports when that plane went down out of New York of something that resembled a missile streaking towards it? The crash investigators themselves had claimed a cover-up, although they’d waited until retirement to say anything. And how about Building Seven of the World Trade Center collapsing at the speed of gravity even though it had never been hit by anything?

Could there really be that big a disconnect between what he wanted to believe because it was in the papers, and what had actually happened? Was he really so blind and apathetic that he’d ignore data he didn’t like because it hinted at a reality he didn’t want to think possible?

If so, one thing was becoming evident by the second. He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t un-see the note, or pretend the words his dead brother had written didn’t exist. He’d have to treat it as genuine, even if he had doubts about his brother’s sanity. The only prudent course was to behave as though he was being watched, and find time to track down the professor and see what he had to say. There was surely no harm in that — play it safe, but not go off the deep end and buy into his brother’s delusion hook, line, and sinker.

Yes, that was the best course — trust, but verify. Don’t jump to conclusions, but also don’t ignore a message from the dead. Because there was still the plane crash to contend with in the alternative theory Jeffrey was forming: one where his brother had been losing his grip. But the plane crash couldn’t be easily dismissed. That was a major sticking point in the “Keith was a loon” hypothesis.

One thing was clear: If Keith really had been involved in something worth killing over, he clearly hadn’t envisioned how extreme the danger was. Would he have ever gotten onto the plane to Rome if he’d suspected it would be the end of his life? Obviously not. Which meant that he’d misjudged his adversaries. A mistake that had cost him everything.

As his thoughts turned increasingly dark, Jeffrey had a sudden impulse to move, to get out of the condo, to run away and never look back.

Except that given what his brother had warned about, that wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t outrun what you didn’t understand. As Keith had ultimately learned.

Fine. I’ll play along. So think. What can you do? What are the first steps?

If everything was bugged, he was hosed. It would be impossible to do anything.

No. That wasn’t correct. It would be harder, but nothing was impossible.

A sudden ugly idea popped into Jeffrey’s consciousness as he paced in front of the couch. His brother had assumed he was still in San Francisco. And so he had been — until the job offer had come.

The job that had seemed too good to be true. The one that had resulted in him cutting off all his personal contacts back home and moving abruptly to the same city Keith had lived in. Where, presumably, it would be easier to keep an eye on him.

Was that what all this had been about?

Viewed in the light cast by the note, the offer suddenly seemed implausible. Why pay a small fortune for him to move? To offer advice any of hundreds of other experts could have at a fraction of the price? And he’d followed along unquestioningly. Believed the transparent flattery, that he was special and different. They’d played to his vanity and he’d bought it.

He shook his head as if to clear it. Was he going down roads of his own invention now, connecting something that was innocent and unrelated? Becoming paranoid about things that didn’t warrant a nefarious explanation? Following his brother down a rabbit hole where the walls had ears and everyone was out to get him?

Maybe so. Or maybe he was just beginning to see the outline of the truth. Maybe that sinking, anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach was the recognition of veracity.

Whatever the case, he had a problem. The first practical hurdle was that if the warning was accurate, his phone and computer were compromised, as was his car. And if it was the government that Keith had gone up against, Jeffrey could assume that his credit cards and passport were also being used to track him.

The only good news was that up until a few minutes ago, he hadn’t known anything, so he couldn’t slip up or do anything that would alert them.

Them.

The bad guys.

But now he knew. And the only defense he had was to act exactly as he had before. Any deviation, any hint of subterfuge, would alert them, and then he could expect the same fate that had awaited his brother.

So what was he going to do? If his every movement was being monitored?

The answer came to him as he put on his coat and walked through his front door to have another beer — liquid courage to calm his frazzled nerves and help him think.

He would have to hide in plain sight.

Because it would be the last thing that anyone would expect.