Empire Games Series, Book 1(52)

“Nothing.” Marianne smiled. “Well, apart from eating three square meals and taking it easy! We’ve got a couple of tests for you. But you don’t start the post-op workup until seventy-two hours after the activation shots. You may feel a bit feverish or unwell—that’s expected with this treatment—but Dr. Lane will look in on you later this morning, and if you feel particularly bad, you can call at any time and one of us will come.”

“Oh.” Rita digested this information. “I’ve got a couple of days off?” Marianne nodded. “Can I go and sit outside? Or use the rec room?”

“Ah, well, there’s a problem, you see.” Marianne smiled, presumably with disarming intent: “You’re not supposed to leave this suite. It’s mirrored in another time line, for safety, in case you jaunt by accident or see a trigger symbol.”

“Oh. Is there a TV?” The nurse shook her head. “Internet…?”

“I’m sorry!” Marianne said brightly. “I can bring you some books if you like? But you’re not allowed any visual media at all until Dr. Lane says so. No Internet, no TV, not even magazines or newspapers.”

“Books.” The prospect of spending the next three days cut off from the world did not fill Rita with unalloyed joy. Camping on a hiking trail in the wilderness was one thing; climbing the walls in a soothingly featureless hospital room was something else again. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind?”

“Sure!” Marianne chirped. “I’ll just go and let Catering know you’re ready for breakfast…”

*

Breakfast was predictable: cereal, juice, an anemic boiled egg, low-fiber toast. Rita wolfed it down, then confronted the morning with a cup of weak coffee and growing boredom. Marianne returned, bringing a small pile of books and pamphlets with her: to Rita’s dismay they consisted entirely of testimonials for Scientology.

Rita had nothing against religion as such. Kurt had grown up Lutheran; Mom and Dad had occasionally taken her to church and sent her off to summer camps run by them, but their approach to such matters was very much that it was a social club. Rita wasn’t sure what she believed, beyond a vague sense that there was something Up There keeping an eye on things. Consequently she found Marianne’s pamphlets disturbing in their zealous insistence that Dianetics, and only Dianetics, held the key to realizing one’s full potential.

Spending the day reading advertorials for someone else’s scripture lacked appeal. So she unpacked and stowed her clothing in the wardrobe, just for something to do. That was when she discovered the musty, coverless paperback that Grandpa Kurt must have stuffed down a zipped side compartment of her carry-on. Normally she had no time for elderly pulp novels: but at least it wasn’t a religious tract.

There was nothing lightweight about The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The combination of the author’s paranoid outlook and his cautionary tale within a tale—set in a metafiction in which the Nazis had won the Second World War—made her head spin as she tried to understand it. But the lack of any alternative kept her chewing doggedly along until evening. Whoever had owned it previously had underlined a couple of passages in every chapter in thick, gray pencil, sometimes phrases or words and sometimes individual letters. Trying to make sense of the annotations gave her a little more to chew on, but ultimately that, too, was unproductive. Unfortunately it wasn’t a particularly fat book, and she reached the end all too soon. The end pages were blank, and she was about to close the book when something caught her eye.

As she turned past the end matter she found herself confronted by a page covered in tiny, very precise handwriting. Squinting in the illumination of the adjustable bedside lamp, she read the opening:

Dear Rita, if you need to talk to me in private, write by hand, trusting no keyboard. Use this book as your one-time pad, using the two methods described below—high risk, low content, fast; and low risk, high content, slow. I may not be able to help, but if you don’t ask you don’t get—Kurt.

Inscribed in the middle of the page, before the code instructions that followed, was a pencil sketch of a knot. As Rita looked at it, it made her feel oddly queasy: guts twisting, vision blurring. She blinked it away hastily, then covered it with her thumb, heart hammering. Oh, Gramps, what have you gotten us into? She began to read the rest of Kurt’s message. Boredom was suddenly very far away.

BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020

FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

DR. SCRANTON: Okay, so our pawn has just leveled up to queen. What’s the state of play looking like now that our prototype is nearing deployment readiness?

COL. SMITH: Well, I think I’ve got a pretty good feel for her character, and she’s not perfect but things could be a lot worse.

AGENT GOMEZ: Oh? What’s not—

COL. SMITH: For starters, we are not dealing with a classic authoritarian follower personality: not even your typical Gen Z me-first narcissist with no patriotism and no loyalty. Instead she got your full-on liberal, nurturing, question-authority upbringing, with an added dose of extreme political cynicism from her grandfather. This doesn’t mean she’s useless—you can motivate anyone, given the right lever—but she’s going to take some work. She’s actually a lot better suited to the mission profile we’re looking at than someone who obeys orders blindly just because they feel good when Daddy tells them what to do. The key issue is that she’s an introvert. Self-contained is a job requirement for spies, especially solitary infiltrators. But it means she doesn’t open up easily and tell us what she’s thinking, and that will make it hard to manipu—motivate her. And it means she doesn’t do well in all facets of training.