Ben Winters - World of Trouble

Astronaut and his crew weren’t even cracking the top thirty, in terms of threats worth worrying about, until a kid named Derek Skeve got caught breaking into the New Hampshire National Guard station. Under interrogation he admitted that he had been pressured into the dangerous mission by his new wife.

“It was Nico who sent him in there, see? She sacrificed him,” says Jordan, whose name is not really Jordan. “It was demanded of her. To prove her loyalty to Astronaut, to the organization, the goals of the organization.”

Jordan’s name is really Agent Kessler; William P. Kessler Jr. My mind is filling with new information, filling up fast.

“DeCarlo loves to play these kinds of cruel games with his people: in group/out group dynamics, tests of loyalty,” says Kessler. “He used to do it when he was running dope: needle scumbag number one into lowering the hatchet on scumbag number two, and he’s your scumbag forever. He did the same tricks to build his new conspiracy group.”

Agent Kessler is FBI. He was a trainee in the technical services division, he told me, rapidly promoted to field agent, just as I was rapidly promoted to detective when everybody else quit or disappeared. The Astronaut conspiracy was his first case—“still working on it, as a matter of fact,” he says, staring up at the flagpole, at the ragged lawn of the Rotary police station.

It took ten minutes of good cop/bad cop for Skeve to start babbling about moon bases, and Kessler’s team knew he was a patsy. But then they got ahold of one of Astronaut’s other shed dupes and figured out what the man was really after: loose nukes. They decided to give them to him. Kessler made his debut as Jordan Wills, a smug wisecracking provocateur in cheap Ray-Bans.

“I showed up at the dude’s house in the middle of the night,” says Jordan. Kessler. “And I give him this whole crazy rap. I’m a former Navy midshipman. ‘I’ve got this hidden trove of documents, about this scientist and his master plan. I heard about your group… you’re the only ones who can help us. You’re the only ones!’”

“And he bought it?”

“Oh, yes,” says Kessler. “God, yes. We told him there were other teams, teams all over the country. We gave him the specific part that he and his buddies were supposed to play. And zoom. Off they go. Chasing the imaginary bombs in all the places I told them to look. Hither and thither, hither and yon. Kept them from killing anybody. Kept them from finding any actual bombs. Kept them spinning their wheels.”

I listen. I nod. It’s good—it’s a good story. The kind of story that I like, the story of a well-conceived and well-executed law-enforcement operation, carried out by diligent operatives staying on the job to keep decent people safe even in the most difficult circumstances. A slow-play sting with a clear intention and a simple strategy: identify the membership of the organization, keep it busy, feed the fire of their lunatic hope. The story, though, it’s hitting me in a tender place, it really is. I’m listening and periodically I’m reaching up to clutch my face while tears roll down and around my fingers.

Kessler and his fellow agents provided Astronaut with all the necessary window dressing to convince them they were involved in a real conspiracy. Internet access and communications equipment, official-looking NASA and Naval Intelligence documents. And of course the ultimate prop: an SH-60 Seahawk, a twin-engine medium-lift helicopter that one of Kessler’s FBI associates was able to “borrow” from a Navy division that had just been recalled from peacekeeping operations, now moot, in the Horn of Africa.

All the stuff that made me wonder, in my dark moments, if I was wrong, if the truth was not the truth. It all looked real because it was supposed to look real.

“What about the document itself?” I ask him. I’ve still got it, it’s in the wagon somewhere, fifty pages of gobbledygook and indecipherable math. “Where did the numbers come from? The whole—the plan?”

“The Internet.” Jordan shrugs. “Public records. Someone might have pulled a file from NASA. The truth is, at a certain point it was like a game. How preposterous can we make the whole thing? How unlikely a scenario, how self-evidently unbelievable, and see if these people would still believe it. Turns out: pretty much all the way. People will believe pretty much any goddamn thing if they want to bad enough.”

The endgame played out just as they had imagined it. Kessler in his role as Jordan lets Astronaut know that Parry has been located and set free—one fake person telling a conman about the location of another fake person—and that he, Jordan, is arranging his transportation to the Ohio location. It’s Astronaut’s responsibility to gather up everyone else, get to this abandoned police station near a municipal airfield, and wait.

“And he did it.”

“Of course he did. By that time, he was sure that he really was going to save the world. He thought he was the drug-dealing robber who had turned into an action hero. But we were writing the script, and the script ended with them sitting in the middle of nowhere, not bothering anybody, waiting for someone who doesn’t exist, until lights out.”

We walk slowly through the woods, Kessler and I. To the small rutted field surrounded by bent trees. Patches of black-red blood are still evident in the muddy puddle where I found the body. He told me he wants to see the crime scene; take prints, do a sweep for evidence. I’ve explained that I did all of those things, but he said he’d like to do it himself.

He wants to see, so here we are, but he’s not doing anything. Agent Kessler just stands at the edge of the clearing, looking at the ground.

Everything is clear except one thing, and even that is pretty clear.

“Jordan?”

“Kessler,” he reminds me quietly, stepping into the clearing.

“Kessler. What happened? Why are you here?”

He squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them again.

“Kessler?”

He’s crouching down on his heels, staring at the mud where Nico died. I need to hear him say it, though. I need to know everything. I have to.

“Kessler? Why did you come out here?”

He speaks slowly. His voice is choked, low.

“DeCarlo’s a maniac. At heart. The file is spiked with bad acts. Sudden violence. He gets double-crossed or cheated, or when things go wrong… bad acts.” The smug kid that I so hated is gone; the furious FBI agent on a mission is gone. Kessler is just a kid. A young guy with a heavy heart. “We knew he was capable of anything at the end, if he figured out that it was all bullshit—or even if he didn’t figure it out. When he finally realized that the world was really going to die, that he was really going to die. The fucking narcissist. God knows what sort of horror show this thing might turn into.” He drifts off, staring. “God knows.”

I picture my sister facedown in the dirt. Of course I do. I can’t help it. Facedown in the dirt, her open wound clotting with mud. God knows .

“I couldn’t—” Kessler says, and then he breathes through his teeth, stamps his boot on the ground. He covers his face with his hand. “All the rest of ’em, fuck ’em. Stupid wild-eyed hippies, let ’em get what they deserve. Trying to steal a fucking bomb. But not—” He cries out again. He sinks slowly to his knees. “Not her.”

I knew it. I guess I’ve known it since he came limping down the hallway to the cell.

“You—had feelings for her.”

He laughs, a wet mucous weeping laugh. “Yeah. You man-child. You weirdo. I had feelings for her. I fucking loved her.”

“But you could have saved her. You could have told her not to come, told her it was all a set-up.”