the outskirts of town when I was twelve. This is the mainstream now, Mike. This is how life in America is. Moment by moment, our country has grown sicker. Our borders, Mike, have come to encompass the nine circles of Hell.”
He suddenly seemed very small and lonely.
“Since the book was lost, Mike. It’s all happened since the book was lost. We need the book back. We need to study it and apply it and make America beautiful again.”
I took a deep breath. The next thirty seconds were either going to save me or kill me, I figured. “You realize I couldn’t care less about that, right?”
I wanted him to, I dunno, react like he was shot, or call his creatures in to shoot me, or anything that was going to get me off this hook I’d been spiked on.
He wasn’t supposed to smile like that.
“We know,” the chief of staff said happily. “This clinched your selection. You see, Mike, what we really need is a human shit-tick, swimming through the toilet bowl of America. We don’t need someone who’s going to crawl to the edge and demand a blue-block and a flush. We need someone content to paddle through the droppings. Someone who doesn’t care about anything but doing their job. That you are some kind of moral mutant who bears no love for the country that gives them life is, amazingly, what suits you best to the task at hand.”
My face sank down into my hands. “Oh, good,” I mumbled. Or “Oh, God.” One of the two.
“Smile, son. In five minutes’ time, there will be half a million dollars in your bank account, available for immediate withdrawal. Yours, nonrecoupable. Tax-free, too.”
I could feel my face involuntarily twisting into a wonky grin. My mom had a regular saying: “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” It usually came out when the police came to tell us Dad had turned up naked someplace again. Sometimes it made me laugh, sometimes it made me cry, but I never felt torn between the two, and sometimes I thought Mom was crazier than Dad for saying it. But this was it. I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud (because it was true, or because he was full of shit) or burst into tears right there and then (because he’d really done it, or because he was lying). I didn’t know what to believe and I didn’t know how to react. I wasn’t scared so much anymore. I just resented the old bastard for making me feel like that.
He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew a flat black plastic thing that he handed over to me. I took it, suspiciously, and gingerly explored the seam my fingertips found on the long side. A catch snicked, and it unfolded into a clamshell-style handheld computer.
“That’s yours,” the chief of staff said as it hissed into life in my hand, its long screen flaring clean white. “It contains all the leads we currently have, and is fitted for wireless Internet access. It goes into a secure system at Treasury, which pushes continuing updates into your machine.”
“You’re just sending me into the wild with half a mil and this?”
“Oh, I will come to see you from time to time, when I have new information. Or perhaps just to see how you’re doing and where you are. Consider me Virgil to your Dante.” This notion amused him no end. His laugh was a dry, raspy, high thing, the sound of skeletons giggling.
He stood up, arranging his baggy suit on his pointy frame. “Smile, son. You are engaged in a great work. Everything is different now. You have the most glorious of goals. You are going to help us save America.”
His eyes glittered like new coins.
“From itself.”
I realized the chief of staff was preparing to leave. I surged out of the chair. “Hold on. I don’t accept commissions just like this. I need, I need, some way to contact you, a longer briefing, something…”
“It’s all in the machine. In a few minutes, you’ll have all the expense money you could want. You contact me through a secure email system, I contact you when I deem it appropriate. Let’s be men here: you know I’ll be watching.”
He extended one long tough hand. “Good hunting, Mr. McGill.” I shook it. I could feel the little bones of his hand moving under my grip, like he was nothing but thin leather and sticks.
He did that curt nod again, spun on his heel,