Operator X
Chapter One · Opening excerpt · Unpublished draft. A former member of a clandestine network is drawn into a disappearance in Austin, Texas.
Someone on this bus is a murderer. Maybe more than one, but that’s not likely. It’s just math. The average person will encounter, by my estimates, ten murderers throughout their life. The guy stocking shelves at the grocery store. The dental hygienist. The high school football coach. Sometimes you can tell. Sometimes you can’t. If you use public transportation, I think that number might be higher. Buses are catch-and-release traps for the desperate. The poor. The lonely.
And me. I tuck my head down and turn up the radio. White noise susurrates in my headphones. It’s the only real way I can find peace. There is nothing in the hiss. No corruption. No abused animals. No trade wars. No immigration. No arson. No voter fraud.
No noise.
William Cannon Drive and Brodie Lane
I don’t know how I got here or how long I’ve been on the bus. How many blocks have passed? The numbers start to fire in my head. How many stops? How many turns? Forty-two stops divided by three hours (a guess) is . . .
I turn the white noise up louder and a man in a rhinestone top hat sits next to me. He’s sweating because it’s August in Austin. He looks tired. Beaten. We all do. A stack of hand-written leaflets is clutched in his fist. The leaflets read “JESUS SAVVES.”
Yaeger Lane and Tompkins Drive
New riders. New smells. Some of it is mine. I smell bad enough to be left alone, but not so bad I draw attention. Never draw attention. Always be invisible.
A man in a blue polo shirt gets on. I watch him in the reflection of the glass. I think he’s watching me. Staring.
The shirt tells me everything. It’s woven nylon, like rough plastic. The logo says Praetor. He’s a mid-level manager who enjoys Bud Light and football. Forty-nine years old. Takes his second wife to San Antonio for their anniversary. Has a few kids.
If I have to set him on fire, the nylon will stick to his skin like napalm.
Loyola Lane and Manor Road The colored spray paint decorating the street is a secret language. You’ve seen it, downtown in the city where you live, on the asphalt or scrawled across the sidewalk. A red diamond sits next to an orange arrow that runs parallel to a big, white ‘X’. Yellow marks indicate there are gas lines beneath the street. Orange is for telecom, your internet and phone. Green is sewage, etc. It’s construction workers and surveyors, people who will possibly never meet, passing information to each other in broad daylight, right under our feet.
The markings flash by outside the window. I study them all, making note of the location so I can come back later to investigate. Those are just the secret codes we know about, the ones we’ve discovered. There’s so much more – cryptograms hidden in graffiti or coded messages in KFC’s glowing sign. You just have to look. You have to pay attention.
I keep an eye out for chalk. The symbol could be on a curb or a trashcan, scratched onto a telephone pole or in the dusty glass of an abandoned building. It’s like a ringing phone, waiting for the right person to pick up. I look for the crook of the Shepherds or the stylized ‘power button’ of Glitch/Sec. I’m always looking for the signs, the hidden code of the Operators.
But there aren’t any. There haven’t been for years. The Clavis Society has gone silent. Its Operators - the hackers and spies and anarchists that I once called family - are all gone, either dead, arrested, or in the wind.
Now it’s just me.
Braker Lane and Dessau Road
The miles in between are gone. I don’t know where they went. That happens sometimes. I think for a moment that maybe I slept, but that’s not likely. I was mapping out how to kill the man in the blue shirt if I needed to and things just went away. He’s gone now. I scan the bus to find who replaced him. Did they send someone else? What do they want?
But everyone is sweating. Everyone is sad. I relax a little.
Two rows up, a man in a threadbare Dallas Cowboys tee-shirt screams at an empty seat. He’s furious with someone who isn’t there. I understand. He’s holding a Powerade bottle and the juice is piss yellow. It’s probably piss.
Two tablespoons of powdered charcoal. Two tablespoons of powdered cinnamon. Week old human urine.
With a little cooking, that’s white phosphorous.
I turn up the radio.
Lotus Lane and Arthur Stiles Road
A large woman with a baby carriage full of trash stands at the front of the bus. She sings a song only the lost have heard. The rhythm fluctuates and the words are gibberish. Her odor chokes the bus. It’s rot. Somewhere beneath those rolls of fat, she’s being eaten alive. She’ll be dead in two months.
I close my eyes.
Stassney Lane and Dove Springs Drive
My stop. It’s dark now. I walk for another half mile in the rain. It comes and goes, just long enough for the summer heat to turn the air into hot soup. Jazzy’s car, an older, two-tone sedan with red tape where one of the tail-lights should be, waits for me in a gas station parking lot. She yelps and spills her coffee when I slip into the passenger seat. “Mr. Phillips,” she says, her voice musical with relief. “You came.”
That’s not my name, but I nod and look across the street. “Is that the place?”
It’s a rundown duplex, maybe Section Eight housing. There’s a row of them here. People sit on what passes for a front porch, smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles in paper bags. The one we’re watching, though, is quiet. Everyone is inside.
Jazzy nods and I see the toll this has taken on her. She always looks weathered and she carries it with quiet dignity. Now she’s just tired, tired with an electric edge of fear. Her skin is drawn and her clothes, ill-fitting and threadbare on the best of days, hang on her like old pajamas. Her gray hair is a frayed halo around her head.
“That’s the place,” she says. “My baby is in there.”
“You’re sure?”
She swallows hard. “That’s what they told me. They didn’t want to. The people I asked down at the shelter, they said leave it alone. Can you imagine that? Someone takes your son and they say to forget about it? Just to walk away? I can’t do that, Mr. Phillips. I just can’t.”
Her hands shake. She hasn’t used in a while. After this, she’ll come down from the anxiety with a fix of Oxy or fentanyl. I won’t hear from her for a few weeks. But right now she’s trying to keep it together, to keep herself from crying and wailing. I don’t handle that very well and she knows it.
“Who did they say took him?”
“I don’t know. Men. They’ve been rounding people up, you know? Three or four at a time. They’ll grab them under the bridge, late at night, when everyone is about to go to sleep.” “And they take them … here?” I ask and she hears the skepticism in my voice.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why. But he didn’t hurt nobody! Pablo is sweet. I haven’t seen him in months. I know I’m not the best mama and he’s got his troubles, but he just … he doesn’t deserve this.”
“Deserve what?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Phillips. Benji – you know, that fella that plays guitar down on 2nd Street? - he says they’re taking people and harvesting their organs, selling them to rich people.”
“Jazzy - “
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’m a nurse. I’ve heard of this. It happens. I don’t want that to happen to my Pablo. I can’t let it. I know you don’t want to be involved. I understand, but I don’t know what else to do, Mr. Phillips. The police won’t talk to me and when I tried to go over there, they wouldn’t even open the door. I just … I just need him back and I thought … I thought you could help.”
The rain patters on the roof of the car again while I stare across the street. “What is it you want me to do, Jazzy?”
She opens her mouth, but I can tell she’s not sure if she should say it. “I … I’m sorry. I don’t mean to presume, but you … I thought you could … I don’t ask questions about your life. It’s none of my business, but you can help him, right? I know you don’t want to do that anymore. I know that, but please, Mr. Phillips …”
She hands me a photo of the two of them. It’s Jazzy, before her addiction got the best of her. It’s Pablo, before he dropped out of school, before he started sleeping under bridges. They look happy. The smiles are honest and real. This is what I’m protecting. This. And the world took it from them.
“Okay.”
I get out and walk across the street before Jazzy can say another word. She doesn’t have to spell it out. If she says it, will that make it real to her? Will that make her culpable?
Mr. Phillips, please go kill those men and bring my son back.
That would be simple, an elegant solution. I hope it’s easier than that. It occurs to me to give them the chance to be nice.
Standing outside in the glow of a buzzing, yellow bulb I rap on the door. There are voices, talking over what sounds like a video game. I can hear three men, maybe four. Someone watches me through the peephole, so I force a polite smile.
I wait a full minute before knocking again. The video game noises dim and the door cracks with the chain in place. A giant of a man – all beard and greasy blubber – looks down at me.
“’Sup?” he asks.
“Hello. I’m looking for Pablo,” I say, and hold up the photo so he can see it.
The giant stares back at me and looks over his shoulder for a second before saying, “He’s not here.”
“I need for him to come outside.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” the giant says, and closes the door.
— End of selected excerpt —