Glenn Cooper - Secret of the Seventh Son

Mark couldn’t find a comfortable spot. He felt raw, his emotions a roiling acid bath. He tried to watch TV but after a few minutes turned it off in disgust. He picked up a magazine then threw it down on the coffee table, sending it sliding into a small framed photograph, which toppled. He picked it up and looked at it: the freshman roommates, twenty-fifth reunion. Zeckendorf’s wife had it framed and sent it as a memento.

He wasn’t sure why he had displayed it. These people meant nothing to him now. In fact, he’d despised them once. Especially Dinnerstein, his personal tormentor, who turned the ordinary traumas of being a socially backward freshman into exquisite torture with his constant ridicule and opprobrium. Zeckendorf wasn’t much better. Will had been different from the others, but in a way he wound up being more disappointing.

In the photo, Mark stood woodenly, faking a smile, with Will’s big arm over his shoulder. Will Piper, golden boy. Mark had spent the entire freshman year enviously watching how easily things came to him-women, friends, good times. Will always displayed a gentlemanly grace, even to him. When Dinnerstein and Zeckendorf ganged up on him, Will would defuse them with a joke or bat them away with his bear paw of a hand. For months he had fantasized that Will would ask to room with him sophomore year so he could continue to bask in his reflected glory. Then in the spring, right before midterms, something happened.

He had been in bed one night, trying to sleep. His three roommates were in the common room, drinking beer and playing music too loudly. In frustration, he shouted through the door, “Hey, you fuckers, I’ve got an exam tomorrow!”

“Did the dipshit call us fuckers?” Dinnerstein asked the others.

“I believe he did,” Zeckendorf confirmed.

“Need to do something about that,” Dinnerstein fumed.

Will turned the stereo down. “Leave him alone.”

An hour later the three of them were beyond drunk: loose-jointed, room-heaving, inebriated-the kind of state where bad ideas seem good.

Dinnerstein had a roll of duct tape in his hand and was sneaking into Mark’s bedroom. Mark was a heavy sleeper and he and Zeckendorf had no problem taping him to the top bunk, looping the film around and around until he looked like a mummy. Will watched from the doorway in a stupor, a stupid grin on his face, but did nothing to stop them.

When they were satisfied with their handiwork, they kept on drinking and laughing in the common room until they crashed out on the floor.

The next morning, when Will opened the bedroom door, Mark was cocooned to the bed, immobile in a gray wrap. Tears were streaming down his red face. He turned his head to Will. There was hatred and betrayal in his eyes. “I missed my exam.” Then, “I peed myself.”

Will cut the tape away with a Swiss Army knife and Mark heard him mutter a thick apology through his hangover, but the two of them never spoke again.

Will had gone on to fame and renown doing admirable things, while he had labored a lifetime in obscurity. Now, he remembered what Dinnerstein had said about Will that night in Cambridge: the most successful profiler of serial killers in history. The man. Infallible. What could people say about him? He clenched his eyelids tightly.

The darkness triggered something. Ideas started forming, and given the speed of his mind, they were forming quickly. As fast as the ideas crystallized, another part of his brain tried to melt them so they would wash away harmlessly.

He shook his head so vigorously it hurt, a dull, pounding pain. It was a primitive impulse, something a very young child might have done to shake evil things out of his head. Stop thinking these thoughts!

“Stop it now!”

Shocked, he stood up, realizing he had just shouted out loud.

He went outside onto the deck to calm himself by scanning the night sky. But it was unseasonably cool and swarms of wispy clouds obscured the constellations. He retreated to the kitchen, where he drank another beer while sitting uncomfortably at the dinette on a high-backed chair. The more he tried to squelch his mind, the more he left himself open to swirling feelings of anger and disgust rising like brackish floodwater.

Day from hell, he thought. Fucking day from hell.

It was after midnight. He suddenly thought of something that would make him feel better and dug his cell phone from his pocket. There was only one way to medicate this epidemic of a day. He took a breath and retrieved a number from the phone’s address book. It rang through.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

“Is this Lydia?”

Sweetly, “Who wants to know?”

“It’s Peter Benedict, from the Constellation, you know, Mr. Kemp’s friend.”

“Area 51!” she squealed. “Hi, Mark!”

“You remembered my real name.” This was good.

“Of course I do. You’re my UFO buddy. I stopped working at McCarran, if you’ve been looking for me.”

“Yeah. I noticed you weren’t there anymore.”

“I got a better day job in a clinic right off the Strip. I’m a receptionist. They do vasectomy reversals. I love it!”

“That’s cool.”

“So what’s up with you?”

“Yeah, well I was wondering if you were free tonight?”

“Honey, I’m never free, but if the question is whether I’m available, I wish I were. I’m just heading over to the Four Seasons for a rendezvous then I’ve got to get my beauty sleep. I need to be at the clinic early. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Oh, sweetie! You call me back soon, you promise? Give me a little more notice and we can definitely hook up.”

“Sure.”

“You say hello to our little green friends, okay?”

He sat for a while longer and, thoroughly defeated, let it happen, succumbing to the emerging plan that was galvanizing in his mind. He’d need to find something first. What had he done with that business card? He knew he’d kept it, but where? He went searching, urgently covering all the usual places until he finally found it under a pile of clean socks in his dresser.

NELSON G. ELDER, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, DESERT LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY

His laptop was in the living room. Eagerly, he Googled Nelson G. Elder and started absorbing information like a sponge. His company, Desert Life, was publicly traded and had been tanking, its stock near a five-year low. The Yahoo message boards were awash in investor vitriol. Nelson Elder was not beloved by his shareholders and many had graphic suggestions about what he could do with his $8.6 million compensation package. Mark visited the company’s website and clicked through to the corporate securities filings. He scrolled though screens of legalese and financials. He was an experienced small-time investor, familiar with corporate documents. Before long he had a comprehensive understanding of Desert Life’s business model and financial condition.

He slapped the laptop shut. In a flash the plan rushed in, fully formed, every detail in vivid clarity. He blinked in recognition of its perfection.

I’m going to do it, he thought bitterly. I’m going to fucking do it! Years of frustration had built up like hot, gassy magma. Fuck the lifetime of inadequacies. Fuck the truckloads of jealousies and yearnings. And fuck the years of living under the weight of the Library. Vesuvius was blowing! He looked again at the reunion photograph and stared icily at Will’s ruggedly handsome face. And fuck you too.

Every journey begins somewhere. Mark’s began with a furious rummage through one of his kitchen drawers, the overstuffed one where he kept a grab bag of old computer components. Before he collapsed onto his bed, he found precisely what he was looking for.

At seven-thirty the next morning he was softly snoring at fifteen thousand feet. He rarely slept on his short commute to Area 51, but hadn’t gotten to bed until very late. Below him the land was yellow and deeply fissured. From the air, the ridge of a long low mountain range resembled the spine of a desiccated reptile. The 737 had only been airborne for twelve minutes on its northwesterly course and it was already starting its approach. The plane looked like a stick of candy against the hazy blue sky, a white body with a nose-to-tail cheerful red stripe, the colors of the long defunct Western Airlines co-opted by the defense contractor EG amp;G for its Las Vegas shuttle fleet. The tail numbers were registered to the U.S. Navy.