Lisa Unger - Smoke

“He didn’t connect that Mariah was Marilyn.”

She shook her head. “No. He never made that connection that I know of. We’d never met her while my father was dating her. So he would have had no way of knowing what she looked like. Maybe Tim never even told him about her. I only learned that they were the same person after Mickey died. When I found the journals, I confronted Tim. He admitted to me that he’d confided in Mickey but claimed he had no idea what Mickey was planning.”

“At that point, Lily, why didn’t you take what you knew to the police?” asked Jeffrey.

She looked at him. “My stepfather. He has made some terrible mistakes that he thought were dead and buried. Trevor Rhames knew those secrets, threatened to expose him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What could be so bad that he would sacrifice his children to escape it?” It was the second time she’d asked that question in forty-eight hours.

Lily turned her eyes to Lydia. “I really don’t know. But he said it involved my mother and that she would be hurt by the exposure, as well.”

“You weren’t curious to know what they might be, these secrets?” asked Lydia, knowing the heart of a journalist too well to let that slide.

“I pressed him, believe me. I did some digging on my own. The best I can figure is that it has something to do with Body Armor and possibly his military career before he married my mother.”

She saw Jeff shift in his seat and Agent Hunt scribble in his book. She thought of the Privatized Military Companies Grimm talked about, she thought about the weapons, the pink diamond they’d found. Everything vague, their connections as delicate and translucent as a spider’s silk.

“So you decided to follow Mickey’s plan and get yourself into The New Day?” said Lydia.

Lily looked at her; there was a flash of something in the young woman’s eyes. That fire they both had to know , no matter the cost.

“I wanted to free my stepfather from their grasp. I wanted to prove that they killed my brother. I wanted to expose them. I thought I was stronger than Mickey. That I had a more evolved sense of myself, too much so to fall prey to their brainwashing.”

“But?”

“But their program is amazingly strong,” she said with a long exhale. “I didn’t know how tentative a hold we have on reality, how under the right conditions we lose ourselves and our ideas of right and wrong like a cheap pair of sunglasses. They take you away from everything that defines you, family, friends, your profession, your privacy. And then they create a new world for you. It’s wild. I thought I could resist.”

“And you did,” said Lydia.

She laughed sadly. “Just barely. I took some precautions; I used my connections at the paper to get in touch with the FBI. I called around and got a lot of sidestepping, no one knew anything about The New Day, no one was available to speak to me, until finally Grimm contacted me. You met him?”

Lydia nodded.

“Grimm wanted The New Day but couldn’t pursue them for political reasons… or that’s what he told me. The deal was: I infiltrated, got all the info I needed to do a ripping exposé and gave him the juice he needed to bust them. In exchange, I kept in contact with him and if I didn’t report he was supposed to come in after me.”

“How did you keep in contact?”

“However I could. I wasn’t a prisoner, ostensibly. I could come and go as I pleased. I called a couple times from my own cell phone, from pay phones at coffee shops. Emailed from an Internet café. I just didn’t count on the drugs and then the cleansing.” She gave a visible shudder and then drank from the water bottle. The very act of talking seemed to drain her.

“I went to a Monday night meeting and I stayed. It was only a matter of days before I turned my money over to them. I figured I should go along with it, just to be convincing. Eventually, keeping in touch with Grimm started to seem like a smaller and smaller priority. By the time they started pushing the ‘cleansing’ on me, it seemed like a promotion, some kind of honor.”

She paused here and looked at the floor. Then out the window into the blackness. They all stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.

“It was Halloween night. I was supposed to begin my cleansing the next day. They claim to wash you of all the negative thoughts and energies and messages that you accumulate throughout your life. When you’re done, you’re this new creature filled with light and positive thoughts, free of pain and addictions, able to go on to achieve everything the Universe intended for you. I was so happy, nearly euphoric. I just had the slightest memory, the tiniest nagging thought that maybe this wasn’t the right thing, that it wasn’t why I’d come.

“Then the weirdest thing happened. A car drove past on the road that ran outside my dorm room. The windows were open and the radio blaring. It was a song from the eighties, ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears. And all of a sudden I was a kid again, walking through the hallways of my high school, the speckled linoleum floors and olive green lockers, the fluorescent lights, the smell from the chemistry lab, and that song playing on a tiny pink Sanyo boom box.”

For a second, she seemed like the Lily Lydia remembered, animated, excited. Some of the color came back to her cheeks and she started to use her hands to express herself.

“And just like that, my life started to leak back, my job, my parents, my apartment. I realized that I was about twelve hours away from losing myself completely, becoming one of the zombies I’d seen hanging out in the common room.”

“So you ran,” said Lydia.

“Yes, I ran. I ran for my life. But they caught me.”

She slumped in her chair.

“They shot me… not with bullets but with those hard rubber pellets riot police use to subdue crowds. It felt like bullets. I thought they’d killed me; I tasted my own blood. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, they had strapped me down, they forced a feeding tube down my throat, played these audio visual messages about shedding the old self, my new day dawning, shifting off the negative messages of a sick society and smothering family. But I don’t remember much of it.” She stopped and smiled here.

“I just kept hearing that song in my head. ‘Shout, shout, let it all out.’ You know it?”

Lydia nodded.

“I don’t know why, but that song saved me. When I heard it in my head I just remembered who I was and where my life was. And I knew that no one could take my power; only I could give it away.”

The tears fell again. She took a tissue from the box and wiped them dry, blew her nose.

“I’m not sure how much time passed but as soon as they removed the tube, I started acting like my New Day had dawned. I just did whatever they wanted, looked vacant and euphoric. But I started pouring out the tea they gave me; I realized whatever is in that just makes you really mellow and susceptible. And all this time I’ve been listening, observing, taking notes.

“I figured Grimm would come for me at some point but then after a couple of weeks I started to get worried. Maybe he couldn’t come in after me; I knew he wasn’t supposed to be dealing with me at all. I started figuring out how I could get away.

“Then there was some emergency in Riverdale. I thought, finally, it was the FBI coming but they moved us down here… just a few of us. They left some people behind; the ones that didn’t have any more money I think, those whose families had cut them off, who couldn’t be extorted.”

“So that’s the agenda?” said Jeffrey. “To draw people with problems into The New Day, take all their money, then extort more funds from the families?”