Chapter 10: The Corporation

When his father fell asleep, Jonny covered him up and turned off the television. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water. He hadn't had a shower since he got here, and he was beginning to feel gross. Jessie would probably plug her nose if she got within smelling distance of him.

He found a towel and hung it near the tub, then climbed into the shower. He was scrubbing his hair when he heard his father yelling. He was about to lean out and answer when the shower curtain was pulled aside suddenly.

Letting out a shocked cry, Jonny grabbed for the curtain. "Dad!" he exclaimed. "I'm naked here!"

"Oh! Sorry, Jonny!" He pulled the curtain shut again. "It's just, I didn't know where you were and – wait a minute." He pulled the curtain back again.

"DAD!"

"Your arms, and your shoulder!"

Jonny grabbed the curtain and yanked it back. "Let me finish!" he yelled.

"All right, Jonny. Sorry." He heard him go out of the bathroom, and he peeked around the edge of the curtain. Then he finished his shower in record time and wrapped the towel around his waist.

"Dad? Are there any clean clothes?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah." His father came in carrying a set of clean clothes. He put them down on the toilet seat and left. When Jonny went to put them on, though, he found that there were only underpants and a pair of shorts. "Dad, where's the shirt?"

His father came back in and sat down on the toilet seat. "Come here Jonny." Jonny walked over to him, and his father looked his torso over carefully for bruises. Jonny was embarrassed.

"Dad, I'm okay. My face hurts some, and my leg hurts some, but . . ." He glanced down at his arm and saw that there was an enormous, black, hand-shaped bruise encircling it. On the other arm there was a similar bruise, less intense. "That's where Crandall grabbed me," he said, pointing at the black bruise. "And that's where Marcus grabbed me." He looked back at his father's face. "Dad? Why are you crying?"

His father didn't answer, just pulled him into his arms and hugged him gently. Jonny hadn't seen his father cry in a long time, and that had been when his mother had died. Hadji would know what to do, but he didn't want those creeps to go get him. He just hugged his father back tightly. "Everything's going to be okay, Dad, right? Race will come and we'll be all right?"

"Yes, Jonny, Race will come."

Jonny wanted to ask for his shirt, but now didn't seem like the best time.


Race walked into the room with Pauline Bettencourt with Jessie's laptop under his arm. The others had insisted that he take another break and eat something before he went on. He got the peculiar feeling that Estella had briefed Diana on the care and feeding of Race Bannon. He did feel a little better with a meal under his belt, but it had been hard to force himself to sit down and eat.

Pauline looked up as he came in, her eyes wary, her face defensive. He walked up to the table and sat down, putting the laptop down in front of him.

"So, Pauline, how's your mother?"

She gave him a puzzled look. "She was fine last time I saw her."

He nodded. "Your grandfather will be glad to hear it," he said. "He's very worried about her, and about you."

The girl's face closed down. "I don't have any grandparents."

"Alan Foster? Did he have the horse ranch when you were little?" Her mouth opened but no words came out. "He's on his way over here right now. I'd imagine he's in the air as we speak."

"He's dead. My grandparents are all dead," she said, her voice quavering.

"He'll be surprised to hear it," Race said. "Your Aunt Mary's coming, too. She was visiting when we called, and she wants to see you."

Pauline blinked and looked down at the table. "Aunt Mary?" she said. "I don't – but she – that's not possible." Her voice didn't sound very firm, though.

He opened up the laptop and touched the sensor pad to get it out of sleep mode. "They really miss you, you know," he said. "See here?" He turned the computer to face her, so that she saw the picture, and her face crumpled up.

"It's not true!" she cried. "It's not true! It can't be true!"

"We didn't put this together, Pauline. Your grandfather's been looking for you and your parents since you disappeared."

"Mom told me he was dead!" she said, shaking her head, looking at nothing. "She wouldn't lie."

"If she thought it would protect you, would she lie?" Pauline looked at him, her eyes wide with shock. "Pauline, tell me what happened when you were six."

"I can't. I'm not supposed to talk about it."

"No one here will stop you."

"I'm not supposed to talk about it," she said again, her voice ragged with tears.

"I really need to know. There's a little boy I care a great deal about that's probably going through a lot the same thing. I need to know what's happening to him."

"I don't know anything about it," she said, crossing her arms, looking everywhere but at the picture on the laptop screen.

"Okay," he said. "I'm going back outside to give you a little time to collect yourself."

He picked up the laptop and stepped outside. Diana raised her eyebrows at him. "That was quite a reaction."

"I just moved her world a few feet to the left of center," Race said. Poor kid. "She's bound to be a little shaky. Now it's time to shake Kathleen up some more."

He walked into Kathleen's room, still carrying the laptop. Putting the computer down, he sat on the chair opposite from Kathleen. Her eyes were extremely wary. "So, have you thought about what I said?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Why'd you do it, Kathleen? Why'd you kill Jonny?" Her mouth worked for a moment, but she just stared at him. "He was twelve years old, for Christ's sake! What threat could he have been?" He pushed the computer aside and leaned toward her. "It was an accident, wasn't it? You can tell me. You didn't mean to, it just happened and you couldn't stop it, right?"

"You don't know what you're talking about!" she said, dropping her head into her hands. "Stop it," she added, her voice muffled.

"You know, Jonny's brother and his grandfather are devastated. Wouldn't it be better for them if they had a body to bury and mourn over? Not knowing can be the worst thing of all."

"He doesn't have a brother," she said, her head snapping up.

"What makes you think that? Benton adopted Hadji five years ago. Those two boys are brothers, and Hadji hasn't got any other family than Benton and Jonny." He sighed shook his head. "Do you know what it does to people to lose someone they love like this? When they don't know where they are and aren't even sure if they're dead or not? Poor Doug. He's never going to know if his grandson's alive or dead. After losing his daughter the way he did, I wouldn't be surprised if this killed him."

Kathleen's expression was troubled, but she didn't speak. He opened the laptop and pulled it out of sleep mode and looked at the picture with its poignant caption. "If this goes on too much longer, Hadji and Doug are going to do something like this." He turned the computer so she could see the screen, and her eyes widened. "That's Pauline, you know, the girl in the next room. Her grandfather put this picture on the web, to let people know that his little girl and her little girl were missing."

Kathleen stared at the picture for a long time in silence. "So, were you or your parents taken like that when you were little?" She shook her head. "You can tell me. Or maybe you don't remember."

Something changed in her expression, like a decision had been made. Face calm, eyes, fixed to his, she reached out and closed the laptop. "No, sir. I'm not like Pauline, or even like Ben. My family was born into the corporation."

Race tried to control his reaction as his gut clenched. "Do tell," he said.

"I don't know what you know," she said, wrinkling her eyebrows. "I mean, you obviously know something."

"Pretend I know nothing, Kathleen. Tell me what I need to know."

She looked away and sighed. "This could get my family into a lot of trouble. Not like it could for the others, but still." She turned back and looked into his face. "The corporation is an autonomous entity separate from national governments. We operate independently, providing goods and services for anyone who can afford them."

This was worse than he'd imagined, and better maybe. "Go on."

"My great-grandfather was one of the founding members. We provide a wide variety of services, but of late our focus has been on research and development. I'm not sure why Dr. Quest was selected for recruitment, he doesn't really fit the profile."

"How so?"

She shrugged. "He's a well known public figure. Mostly the people we take are on the fringes. People that won't be missed, people whose lives aren't allowing them to live up to their potential."

"So what do they want with him?"

"They want him to work for them. Everyone we take is brought into the corporation one way or another."

"So why did they kill Jonny?"

"Jonny's not dead!" she exclaimed. "Killing him would defeat the purpose."

"The purpose?"

She looked down at her hands. "I was raised to think that this was they way things should be, that it was all for the good of the corporation." She sighed. "Kids and their parents were brought in, and if the parents didn't cooperate, the kids would get hurt." Race felt himself tense. She looked up nervously, as if she sensed his reaction. "Just a little at first, and usually it was enough. Their parents would start working, and eventually they would assimilate. The kids would be tested to see what their aptitudes were and guided into fields of study that most suited them and the corporation."

"Usually?" Race asked.

"Sometimes people would be stubborn. Or they'd get stubborn when they were told to do something they didn't want to do."

"And then what would happen?"

For a moment, she was silent, and he thought she wasn't going to answer. "When I was ten, a family was brought in. They had three children, a girl who was my age and twin boys who were about six. Cynthia and I got to be friends. Her parents were in medical research. I don't know what happened, what changed, but there was something. Cynthia started missing school, and when she did come in, she was really quiet. One time she came in with a broken arm." Race had to remind himself to breathe. What were they asking Benton to do? What was happening to Jonny? "When I asked her what was wrong, she wouldn't tell me. Then she stopped coming in to school altogether, and I went to her parents' quarters to see what was wrong." Kathleen's eyes had darkened so that they looked like glittering emeralds. "She was dead, and one of the little boys had a bad bruise on his upper arm." She cleared her throat. "After that, nothing happened to the twins, but her parents were always serious, and they didn't talk much to each other anymore."

She fell silent again, and finally Race said, "And?"

"I asked my mother about it when I was older. She said that they hadn't cooperated, and that Cynthia had paid the price. That the corporation had to look out for its interests." She shook her head. "I was fifteen, and I didn't think it made sense. But you don't question the corporation." Giving him a serious look, she said, "Pauline was, I don't know, six or seven when her parents were recruited. She was in a different unit from me when we were kids, but when we both turned out to be unusually gifted in the sciences, we wound up in the same classes a lot. She's brilliant, amazingly so. When kids are that smart, the corporation likes to get them an outside education, but they almost never send out someone who's in the first generation. Ben was born in the corporation, and his parents didn't mind so much. Matt's grandfather was brought in when Matt's father was eight or nine, and he volunteered. Pauline is different. When it was decided that she would go to an outside university, she was taken away from school for a while. When she came back, she was different. Quieter, more serious. And she never talked about what happened while she was gone. That was when she was fourteen, and I was seventeen. I went away to college the next year, but from what I hear, she was taken away for three weeks every year. I don't know what they did, but she's the only first generation kid ever allowed out of the corporation that I've ever heard of."

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"I've been in college for five years now, and no one else from home is at MIT right now. I guess maybe I've been contaminated, but I've read a lot of books, and seen a lot of movies, and I know that things out here are different than they are in there. Only one of my friends ever had any of her friends die when they were little, and she grew up in East L.A." She shrugged. "After September 11th, there was a lot of stuff all over the place about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. I know for a fact that my father has been part of a research project that was developing a nerve agent."

Race put that information aside for now, aware that this interview was being recorded. "Will you tell me what happened when you folks abducted them?"

"Well, Dr. Quest was caught immediately, but Jonny was harder to find. I was on a team that was going out to search the grounds, but then we heard a ruckus on the wall. One of the guys tried to grab him, and Jonny was knocked off the wall. He fell into a bush, and," she shuddered. "He was hurt pretty bad. We got him stitched up, and then we took them to the boat."

There was a sudden beeping as his phone rang. Reaching into his pocket, he stood up and opened the door. "Diana, take this and answer it," he said, handing the phone out, and went back to sit with Kathleen. "Please go on, Kathleen."

"We traveled out to sea a fair distance to get to one of our planes. Dr. Quest and Jonny were taken aboard, and we got them situated. Then the man who was in charge of the operation came back on the boat with us, the six of us who'd rented it." She took a deep breath. "He was very angry that the boy had been hurt. No one's supposed to be injured in these operations. You've been asking where Steve and Molly went. Steve was the one who tried to grab Jonny. He – he was shot. Molly went into hysterics, and had to be sedated and taken back home. The other four of us took the boat back and . . . we just did what we were told to do. Made like we were taking a vacation in Canada."

"Where did they take them?" Race asked.

"I don't know." He snorted skeptically. "Really, I don't. It wasn't my part of the operation."

"Surely you could guess."

"Even if I could, I don't know where any of the bases actually are. We're always flown in and out. The only people who know how to get to them are the pilots, and they're never allowed to leave the planes when they're in the field. All I know for sure was that it was a few hours flight to get where they were going, and I only know that because that's what somebody told me to tell Dr. Quest."

"I see." Race stood up. He needed some time to digest this incredible story, and discuss it with the others and with Phil. "Excuse me, Kathleen."

He left the room and shut the door behind him, leaning back against it. Diana was waiting, his phone closed in her hand. "What do you make of that?" he asked.

"We've already got confirmation on some of it," she said, her eyes showing her to be somewhat ill at ease. The other two stood nearby in silence.

"What?"

"That was Phil. The satellite footage shows the boat meeting a plane. They haven't gotten much further than that, though. He thought he should bring you up to date as soon as he had any information at all, he said."

"Good. Did you pass on any of what you heard?"

She shook her head. "I just told him you'd have a lot to tell him when you called him." She stared in the window at Kathleen. "Do you believe it?"

"I don't know how much of it I believe. It fits my deductions, though."

"She was trying to protect Pauline," Thomas said.

"Yeah, I noticed that," Race agreed.

"And she didn't give you any names that we don't already have," Thomas added.

"Nope." Race shook his head. "That's one hell of a story. Can you get a copy of that tape and send it to Phil somehow?"

"That could take hours," Kiley said, sounding kind of numb.

Race wrinkled his brow. "No, get the tape, I'm sure either Hadji or Jessie can somehow transfer it into a file that they can send by e-mail."

"Right." Thomas walked off quickly and Race went through the others to the conference room and sat down. Diana walked up and handed him his phone. "Thanks." Dialing the number, he got through to Phil.

"Corvin here."

"One of the kids finally talked. She says they're part of something she just calls 'the corporation.' I'm going to try to get Jessie to compress the audio of the interview and send it to you by e-mail." There was silence on the other end of the phone. "Corvin?" He could hear the sound of breathing, so the connection hadn't been broken. "Phil?"

"Did you say 'the corporation'?" Phil said finally.