The Truth of the Matter (7 page)

I opened my eyes. I looked down at the metal chair.

We’re going to give you something that will make you
remember
, Waterman had told me.
I wish I could say it
was going to be painless, but it’s not. I wish I could say it
was going to be instantaneous, but it’s going to take time. Still, in the end, everything that has happened will come
back to you
.

Everything, I thought. Everything will come back. That’s all that mattered. I didn’t care how much pain there was. I’d take the pain. I just wanted to remember my life.

Now my gaze lit on the steel chest standing against one wall. There was a tray on the chest that hadn’t been there before. There was a plastic bottle filled with water on the tray. There was a sandwich on a paper plate wrapped in plastic. I suddenly realized how thirsty I was.

I let go of the chair and moved unsteadily across the small Panic Room toward the chest. When I reached it, I saw there was a 3 x 5 index card lying between the water bottle and the sandwich. There was a note written in block letters on the card.

The note said:
Eat. Drink. Build up your strength. You’re going to need it
.

There was no signature, just a doodled symbol, a hastily drawn stick-figure house—a square with a triangle roof on top and an X filling up the square.

I picked up the water bottle. It was one of those bottles with the built-in straws. I sipped at it gratefully. It was a shock when the cold water first hit my stomach, but then I felt the cold flooding through me, clearing my head, strengthening my body. I felt steadier almost at once.

I picked up the sandwich plate and carried it back to the metal chair. I unwrapped it. Turkey and cheese. I took a bite. It tasted good, but when it went down, there was a moment when I thought it would come right back up again. Then the moment passed, the food settled, my stomach settled. I felt hungry. I ate the rest of the sandwich quickly, lifting the water bottle in between bites.

As my body felt stronger, as my mind cleared, I thought about what had happened. I tried to figure out my situation. Waterman had been honest with me. He’d said he was going to give me a drug that caused me pain and brought my memory back and that’s what he’d done. It made me think maybe the rest of what he’d said might be true as well.

We’re the good guys, Charlie. If liberty is better than
slavery, like you said—if the people who work for liberty
are the good guys—then we’re the good guys, though we
can’t always be as good as we might like .
. .
We have to be
sure you’re still on our side .
. .

The good guys . . .

As I took the last bite of the sandwich, I lifted my eyes to look at the wall, at the space on the wall where the secret door had been. I remembered more of what Waterman had said.

The Homelanders are close. Very close. They’ve hacked
some of our files. We don’t know how many. We don’t know
how much they know. But they know about me
.
They’ve
been watching me for weeks. It’s only a matter of time
before they find this place and strike and try to kill us all . . . The people in this bunker are some of the only people
left who can stop them. If they get to us, then we’ve got no
chance
.

I realized I had to talk to Waterman. If I couldn’t remember what had happened with him in that car, then maybe he could explain it to me. In any case, I had to convince him that I was still on his side, that I was still one of the good guys, that if I could help him fight the Homelanders, I would do it, no matter what it took.

I set the paper plate down on the floor next to the water bottle. I stood up, my body stiff, but much stronger now. I moved to the space in the wall where the secret door was. I lifted my hand to knock . . .

Before I could, I was startled by a pounding that hit the wall from the other side. It was loud. It seemed to shake the room. It sounded as if someone was hammering his fist against the wall, just a little ways off to my left. I froze where I was, my hand lifted.

The pounding came again, moving now, coming toward me.
Boom, boom, boom
. As if the person was probing along the wall, trying to find an opening. Maybe trying to find the secret door into the Panic Room.

Who was it? Were they looking for me? Did they know I was here?

The pounding got closer and closer until finally it was directly opposite me. It was coming right through the wall across from me. Whoever was pounding was standing just a few inches from where I was standing with only the wall—and the invisible door—between us.

I stood frozen where I was. Waiting. Would he find me?

But the pounding continued moving along the wall. It went past me and on into the corner. There, finally, it ended.

All this time, I had stood rooted to the floor with my hand lifted, stopped in that moment when I’d been about to knock, about to call Waterman for help.

Now I lowered my hand. Whoever that was pounding on the wall, I felt pretty sure it wasn’t Waterman.

Slowly, breaking free of my frozen surprise, I moved back to the wall. I pressed my ear against it. I listened.

The wall was thick. Very thick. The Panic Room had been built as a hiding place, not to be discovered. That made it hard to hear anything on the other side. There were voices—low, deep male voices—but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I pressed more tightly against the wall. I held my breath, straining to hear.

There was more conversation, dim, distant, wordless. I stood there, frustrated, unable to make out any of it.

Then an angry shout. For about two seconds, maybe three, the furious voice reached me clearly. It was a deep, hollow voice screaming in a language I didn’t understand. Arabic, it sounded like.

The moment I heard it, the moment I heard that voice, my head snapped back away from the wall. A thrill of fear flared inside me. The voice faded from my hearing as I staggered back a step from the wall. I stared at the space. My mouth had gone dry. My legs felt weak.

I
remembered
that voice! Somehow, from somewhere. I knew the man who was speaking. I tried to picture his face, tried to call up his name, but I couldn’t. It was just beyond the edge of my memory, a shadowy presence in the deeper darkness of the year I had forgotten.

Still—still—I knew him. I was sure of it. And I knew something else too: I knew he was a killer. Tough, vicious, wicked to the bone.

I could not recall his face or his name, but I knew this for certain: he was one of the Homelanders.

They were here.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Waylon

I stood there, frozen. I didn’t even breathe. A thousand thoughts flashed through my head in a second.

Waterman’s words:
The Homelanders are close. Very
close . . . It’s only a matter of time before they find this place
and strike and try to kill us all
.

Had they done it? Had they broken in? Had they gotten Waterman and his friends? Or had he escaped? Where was he?

I knew I had to do something, had to move. It was like forcing myself to break free from a block of ice. But I did it. I made myself step forward, step back to the wall again. I made myself press my ear against the wall.

Once again, I heard that voice—now that I recognized it, I could distinguish it even though I couldn’t hear the words. Again, the face of that vicious killer seemed to rise up out of the darkness of my memory— come close to the surface—then sink back down again into obscurity.

Then—startling—another shout—another voice—this one speaking English: “There’s no one else in here either!”

The killer answered him with a shouted curse.

The other man shouted in English again: “There must be another way out.”

Then a third man shouted: “Waylon! No one here either. Maybe they snuck him out before we showed up.”

The killer—obviously their leader—shouted out another stream of Arabic.

I felt suddenly hollow inside. Hollow and weak and unsteady. I knew it was me they were looking for. And I knew that name too. The killer’s name: Waylon. This was something I did remember clearly, something that had happened when I woke up strapped to that metal chair with the Homelander goons working me over.

There had been voices outside the door. There had been a man with an American name but a thick accent: Waylon. He had been coming from the Homelanders’ leader, a man who called himself Prince. He had given the order to my torturers:

The West boy is useless to us now. Kill him
.

I understood why Waterman had put me inside the Panic Room. The Homelanders had been following him. They’d breached some of his files. They might know about this bunker. They might even have the entry codes. But he must’ve felt the Panic Room was still secure. He must’ve felt he could keep me safe here while I was helpless under the influence of the drug.

I listened. Outside in the main bunker, there was a pause, silence. I could feel them out there, on the other side of that wall. I could sense them looking for me, listening for me. I felt that if I made even the slightest noise, they would hear it. They would find me. They would kill me. Waylon would finally kill me, as he’d wanted to do all this time.

Then, Waylon spoke. He was standing right next to me, directly on the other side of the wall. His voice seemed almost at my ear and, even through the thick wall, I heard every word he said with perfect clarity.

“All right. We’ll have a look around for him outside first. Then we blow this place to pieces. If he’s hiding here anywhere, he won’t survive.”

One of the others answered him: “But I thought we were supposed to question him about . . .”

“I know what we’re supposed to do!” Waylon shouted back. “But if he is here somewhere and we can’t find him—we can’t let him get away. Do what I tell you. Set the explosives! Make sure no one gets out of this hole alive!”

I heard them moving again, heard their wordless voices again, talking to one another, the sounds growing dimmer as they moved out of earshot, as they went to search for me in the ruins of the facility outside.

Then it was quiet.

I stepped back away from the wall again. I looked around. They were going to blow the bunker up. Just in case I was here. If they couldn’t find me, they were going to make sure they killed me.

And now the Panic Room—the place Waterman had intended to be my refuge—had become my trap—and would be my coffin.

Because there was no way out.

CHAPTER NINE
The Second Wave

I stood where I was, turning this way and that, looking frantically around me as if I might discover some other exit.

But there was none. I knew there was none. The only entrance and exit was that secret door, and I didn’t know the code that opened it. That code—that series of passes Waterman had made with his hand to make the door slide open: I had tried to follow it, to memorize its straight lines and slashes, but it was way too complicated to fix in my mind. I had only the vaguest idea of the pattern.

I stepped up to the wall. I passed my hand over it. It was an act of pure desperation. I tried to imitate the straight lines and diagonals Waterman had made. But of course nothing happened. The door didn’t open. It was hopeless. I was stuck in here. Stuck while the Homelanders prepared to blow the place—and me—into oblivion.

I looked around again, hoping for another idea. I saw the chest. I moved to it quickly. I knelt down beside it. I took the tray off and placed it on the floor. Then I pushed up the lid of the chest. It opened easily.

There was a pile of blankets inside. I pulled them out quickly, tossing them onto the floor. There was nothing underneath. The chest was empty. I felt the bottom, some crazy idea forming in my head that maybe there was a trapdoor, a secret tunnel or something like that. No such luck.

I crouched back on my heels and tried to think. There had to be something I could do. There had to be something I could at least try.

An idea began to form in my mind—and as it did, a slight hope began to rise in me . . .

And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the pain struck again—that writhing, fiery snake of pain that I’d felt when the crow-faced woman injected me. I cried out and twisted backward, as if I could escape it. But it gripped me from within, twisted me, made me thrash helplessly on the floor for an endless second, and then another, and then . . .

It all began again. I felt myself break free of my body, as if my soul were floating away. I could see myself there below, twisting on the floor, gripping my stomach, but I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. My body grew more and more distant. I reached out for it, trying to grab hold of myself, to get back into myself. I couldn’t leave my body now! This was no time to go flying into the past—not with the Homelanders getting ready to dynamite the bunker.

But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop it. I drifted further and further away until even the urgency of my situation seemed part of another world, another life. A moment later, I had forgotten what the urgency was. I was entering an all-surrounding darkness, turning away from my lost body, turning toward a small point of light that I knew contained my memories . . .

In a flash, I was there, in the past. I was in the long black limousine. I was sitting in the backseat with Waterman. I wasn’t watching the scene this time. I was in it. I was part of it. I was living it again.

The black limousine was moving now. It had left the reservoir behind. The driver was guiding it into the darkness of the hills around my town. There was nothing on either side of us but looming forest and the night.

“What I’m about to tell you is a secret,” Waterman was telling me. “A secret of the United States government. If you tell anyone, you’ll be endangering people’s lives. I want to know if you’re ready to hear it and if you can promise me not to tell anyone, not even your parents, not even your closest friends, no one.”

I sat in the darkness, nervous. Was this guy really an intelligence agent for the United States government? What did they have to do with what happened to Alex? What did they have to do with me?