“And I believed it would work.”
“Why? Why didn’t you realize? You’re the expert. You’re supposed to know everything, do everything.”
Her face looked like it would break apart and I thought, don’t you dare, don’t you dare cry. She said, “I thought…I thought the SDA could control them. And I thought I controlled the SDA. Oh God, I was so stupid.”
“I trusted you,” I said.
“I know. And Paul trusted me. That poor boy. Ellen… I… I’m—” She stopped. I guess she realized she’d already said how sorry she was.
I said, “He just wanted love. That’s all he wanted.”
“Love and power,” Alison Birkett said. “Just like all of us.”
And that did it. I don’t know why, but I just started to cry. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, all I could do was run on like a double faucet, with my shoulders jerking up and down. She held open her arms, timidly, halfway. I might have resisted if she’d been more confident. Instead, I half stepped, half fell into her hug.
I don’t know how long she held me. It felt like a long time. I think she was crying with me, but I’m not sure, I was crying enough for both of us. When I stopped and pulled loose from her, I didn’t know what to do, if I should say something, or run out of the office.
Alison said, “I understand the SDA put a chip in you.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess they told you.”
“I might as well let you know,” she said. “I got them to tell me the frequencies and I’ve had my own teams monitoring the readings day and night. We can no longer trust the SDA for anything.” When I didn’t answer, we both just stood there.
That’s when she brought up the other thing, the part of this I’d known would come up sooner or later. “Ellen,” she said, “there’s something we need to talk about. I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m not sure there’ll ever be a right time.” She waited. When I didn’t answer, she sighed, “I suppose you know what I’m going to ask. I’m sure you’ve thought about it. I’ll have to speak to your parents as well, but I wanted to ask you first. The question is this: do we fight? Do we go public?”
Well, I had thought about it. I’d imagined her asking me that question, or something like it, and I believed I wouldn’t know what to say. I thought I didn’t care. But I didn’t even hesitate, I answered right away. “Yes,” I said, and my hands amazed me by clenching into fists. “I want to get them. I want to make them hurt.”
She sighed. “You’re too smart not to know what will happen. Especially after that damn TV spectacle of Paul in the elevator. The reporters will be all over you. You, your parents, anyone they can find. The magazines, the newspapers and especially the TV people, they’ll come at you like an army of Malignant Ones themselves.”
“And you,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s my job. With me, they’ll come to my office. With you, they’ll come to your house.”
I said, “Maybe Nightline will hire Lisa Black Dust 7.”
She smiled. “Maybe they already have.”
“I want to fight.”
“Yes, I know. I do too. You have no idea how much I want that. I want to go after them more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. But please, Ellen, think about it. At least until I speak with your parents. I…I can try to protect you. I’m certainly not going to promise. Not after what’s happened. But if we do fight I will do everything I can to help all of you. With the media as well as the enemy. And I do promise never to take you or your safety for granted.”
Well, it turned out that just getting my folks to talk with Ms Birkett took a couple of weeks. She’d tried to call them, apparently, and my father had threatened her, while my mother had simply refused to speak at all. When I tried to push them into a discussion of what we should do they pulled the “you’re just a kid” routine on me.
I figured Daddy was the weak link and went to work on him. I played up all his anger at government cover-ups, at corruption, at the SDA having too much power. But he was scared. It was one thing to shout and shake his fist, but another to actually do anything. When I tried to talk about Paul, and not just the government, he always changed the subject.
It really amazed me when my mother turned out to be the one to give in. I hadn’t even really talked with her about it, though a couple of times she’d intervened between me and my father. But I knew how scared she was. I saw her once doing the laundry. She opened the washing machine lid and jumped back, as if snakes would come slithering out at any moment. And a couple of times I’d caught her gripping her amulet really hard, with her eyes closed and her lips moving. And then one night we were all sitting at dinner, none of us saying anything, and Mom looked like she wanted to cry, and I was thinking, great, just what I need, when suddenly she banged her fist on the table, and said, “Damn! Damn, damn, damn.”
Daddy stared down at his plate a moment, then he got up to walk over to her. “Honey,” he said, and tried to put his arms around her.
She pushed him away. She growled and pushed him away. I’d never heard her growl before. She looked up at him, and even though her head was shaking no, she said, “I want to go see Alison Birkett.”
So we did it. It took several more days of discussion—especially about the precautions we needed to take, the extra teams Ms Birkett had brought in to watch over us (she had them implant a second chip in each of us, with frequencies known only to her staff), the methods to make sure the story got out if anything happened to us—but we finally did it. We all sat there in the office, Daddy and Mommy and I all holding hands, while Alison called the New York Times and offered them the biggest story since the Pentagon scandal.
Maybe you saw the headlines. “Man Found Dead In Elevator Was Under SDA Protection.” That’s how we started. Alison said we should break the story “in increments” to let it build. But it didn’t take long for the blockbuster to get out. If I’d wanted, I could have saved another Time cover. And Newsweek too. I still remember the Newsweek one. That repulsive picture of Paul’s body and above it, in flaming letters, “Demonic Corruption”, with smaller letters underneath: “Alison Birkett Accuses US Government Of Hiring And Protecting Malignant Ones.”
That was half the attack, the media pressure. The other half was a lawsuit against the SDA. We charged them with malfeasance, malpractice and various other mals, and demanded $10,000,000 in damages. At first the idea overwhelmed me. Alison Birkett and I were suing the SDA! But somehow, I don’t know, after a while it kind of sickened me. That we might get rich because Paul fell for some stupid Ferocious One. Paul had hoped to get rich. All that talk about promotions. And now the snakes had gotten him, and we were asking for $10,000,000.
In a way, we did need money, if not that much. Alison had her teams watching over me and my folks day and night. As well as checking our personal readings, they monitored the house, Daddy’s office, even my school. At the moment, she was paying them herself, but she couldn’t keep that up for long. And of course, when you ask for a lot of money you get more publicity than if you ask for a little. Even so, I didn’t like it.
I felt kind of rotten about the media uproar too. At first, it knocked me out, the idea of being on television. But then it just exhausted and finally disgusted me. Actually, Alison did a pretty good job of shielding me. She managed to break the news in ways that emphasized the government’s part in what happened and not me and my folks (she even apologized to me for “trivializing” my “heroism”). Maybe you saw that creep John Sebbick squirming on 60 Minutes. I enjoyed that one.