Maintaining eye contact has been easy and natural, but my eyes involuntarily flicker to the ground from a moment when she mentions what everyone considers to be the greatest achievement of my life. She cocks her head slightly.
She noticed that?
“Forget what you’ve read about me. I just solve puzzles Ms. McLeod.”
Martha opens her mouth to reply but thinks better of saying whatever was on her mind. I take the opportunity to change the subject.
“Was this a chance meeting Ms. McLeod? Or was there something I can do for you?”
Her head moves back a centimeter, like I’ve caught her in some sort of act.
“I was just walking home, but when I saw you I wanted to ask a question. In the comet problem you asked if we should make just a tiny bit of room in our thoughts to consider that an external force could have been at work in saving the earth. I’m just wondering how you would answer the question. What sort of external force were you trying to suggest? It sounded like you were leaving the door open to the possibility God exists.”
That’s the boldest statement ever made to me by a student. And on a public street no less. Who is this woman?
“This is why I teach History instead of Philosophy Ms. McLeod. The danger of Philosophy is that it often asks seemingly unanswerable questions. Unsolved puzzles if you will. Mankind hates unsolved puzzles and too often creates illogical explanations for things current science can’t explain, but will explain in the future. That could be the origin of man believing in gods.”
A twitch of the corner of her mouth. My response made her happy, like I fulfilled a preconceived notion she was holding about me.
“I understand,” she replies. “You weren’t leaving the door open to God’s existence, you just didn’t complete your thoughts about scientific explanations.”
“Solving puzzles requires asking the right questions at the right time, Ms. McLeod. You just didn’t ask the right question.”
“Really? So what’s the right question?”
“The question you should ask me is what we would say if we could exhaust all reasonable scientific explanation and the puzzle remains unsolved.”
“You’re cracking open the door again?” she asks.
She narrowed her eyes. My answer conflicted with her preconceived notions.
“I’m an unsolved puzzle too Ms. McLeod.”
***
As I continue walking home I think about unsolved puzzles. From an early age no puzzle has ever held me for long. By the time I was six years old I had moved to “real life” puzzles like mysteries and crime scene investigation. I even helped the local police solve a crime when I was seven. By the time I was eight…well, I guess my interests changed in a hurry when I was eight. That’s the year my parents were killed and my Aunt Jennifer moved into my life. That’s when my talent for solving puzzles put me on the path to being The Cult Hunter.
I look at the sidewalk in front of me and think about paths in life. Do I keep walking straight and take the shorter path home or do I turn to the right and take the longer but sunnier path?
My father’s side of my family tree has long been known in Atheist circles and once she became my guardian, my nasty old aunt wasted no time in making me part of the family legacy. She saw the potential to develop my puzzle solving skills into a weapon in the war to eradicate religion. She made me spend countless hours studying the works of prominent Atheists until I knew their doctrines cold.
I smile inwardly at the thought of knowing the doctrines “cold”. There is no more apt word than that. I found no “life” in their message.
Next I studied the history of each of the “Abrahamic” religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Of course, since I had no access to the ancient holy books it wasn’t quite a true history, it was the history of religion as written by modern Atheists. She even had me learn the ancient languages of Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic. That seemed particularly pointless considering the computer could translate those languages, but she was insistent. I was happy to do the work just to have an excuse to spend less time with her.
Jennifer even saw to it that I ended up in the cult hunter corps. I was barely thirteen at the time and fresh out of college. I proposed taking some time to travel the world but she made a few calls to the right people and within days the corps made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Literally, a notice of mandatory public service showed up at my door in the hands of a large agent who told me to pack a bag.
The first day on the job I took a lot of teasing from the older guys for being the “boy genius”, but I must admit, I was in my element. The corps had fascinating puzzles for me to solve and they were getting nowhere with them. Within a week of my arrival the teasing stopped as I started putting together the pieces in front of me.
I remember how hard I laughed when I first saw how the Christians were running circles around the corps’ best agents. The old men were dependent on computer code breaking algorithms and had no understanding that puzzles are a human art. As they watched their computers chugging through data the nation’s best investigators couldn’t even see the symbols < in a communication looked like a fish and signaled the beginning of an embedded message. That observation alone got me assigned to “Special Projects” and tasked with uncovering Christian communications. In two months the old guys who teased me were all working under me.
I wish I could accuse the corps of forcing me to work as a child laborer, but I can’t. I loved code breaking and would willingly spend countless hours poring over transcripts sent to or from suspected Christians until I rooted out the puzzle pieces and fit them together. One of the old guys even scratched a tally marks in the paint above my office door to represent the number of times they found me in the morning asleep at my desk.
As each new code was broken the government set up computer systems that could monitor virtually all electronic communications worldwide and search them for the written or spoken word patterns that I uncovered. The kill teams took it from there.
After I found the modern code words and symbols Christians were using in their earlier communications, they switched to using ancient languages to communicate. I don’t know if my education by Aunt Jennifer was all part of her careful calculations or if it was just a lucky guess but she’d made me the only person in the world who reads and speaks ancient Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Aramaic.
As I broke the codes based on ancient languages I went from being the kid genius to corps legend. When I’d walk the halls people would stop to let me pass, some would even bow their heads. For some people becoming a legend provides them with everything they want, fame, money, sex. Maybe those people even find happiness. For me it seemed like becoming a legend slowly transformed the joy of solving puzzles into isolation, loneliness and pressure. Nobody else knew it but I could see that each time I would crack a code the Christians would develop a new system that was more intricate than the last. We were in a game of cat and mouse where I was slowly creating a better mouse.
I look at the sidewalk again and snort a laugh when I notice that it’s full of cracks. No matter which path you choose there’s no avoiding cracks in life.
Then they finally did it, the Christians stumped me with what would later be known as “The Final Code”. I could see that they were still communicating, but I couldn’t decipher any of it. Never in my life had a puzzle held me for so long and as the weeks turned to months I became more distant and moody. By the time a year had passed my days were spent sitting in my office staring at the data, refusing to speak with anyone.
Maybe it was desperation, maybe sitting alone in the dark had driven me insane but that’s when I crossed a line that even a cult hunter isn’t allowed to cross. Luckily, the gamble worked and soon the Christian codes began to unravel. The funny thing is, nobody even asked me to explain how I’d cracked the final code. Maybe it never occurred to them that I could have crossed some lines, maybe they never cared where the lines were drawn in the fir
st place. Either way, the secret of how the code was broken stayed with me.
I took my findings straight to the Director and even he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Christian communications were everywhere, once you knew how to look. That’s when the saying “There’s no such thing as a retired Cult Hunter” was born. The Director reactivated everyone who’d ever served on a kill team and unleashed them all at once. And to say “unleashed” isn’t an understatement, they were like packs of wild dogs. People were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and shot in the street. That’s what the classified reports said anyway, the news was never allowed to report any of it and the general public went back to their favorite shows and drugs.
The Christian code master, Zach, who’d stumped me for a year was caught, I made sure of that. He was so sure his system couldn’t be broken that he’d embedded his name and location into several communications. He’d even included a personal taunt he thought I’d never see, it said “Zach 1, Cephas 0”.
The one thing the corps didn’t let me do was speak with anyone they arrested. I argued that just few hours of simple conversation would help me to understand the Christian mind and lead to new breakthroughs. I practically begged the Director to let me meet Zach, but he wouldn’t budge. He said I’d won the war and he was right. With their codes broken and Zach in custody it wasn’t long before all Christian communications disappeared worldwide. Unable to communicate on a large scale, the corps assumed Christianity would soon fall apart from disorganization.
I order my com to open the front door and enter my house. Sitting on a small table inside the door is a favorite three dimensional puzzle from when I was kid, which I pick up and roll around on my fingers. Most people never solve it but I first did it when I was four. It was my most prized possession and I carried it around like other kids might carry a teddy bear.
After the dust settled from me breaking the final code the corps held a ceremony in my honor. My Aunt Jennifer dug the puzzle which I now hold in my hand out of my old room and presented it to me as a gift. “You are the Puzzle Master. This puzzle represents your triumph,” she said and the entire corps clapped.
“No Aunt Jennifer, this puzzle represents joy,” I say to my empty house and hold the puzzle up in the sunlight. “Or at least it used to.”
I set the puzzle back on the table and wonder where those childhood emotions went. How did the sense of joy and wonder that puzzles used to bring me disappear from my heart? How is it that in breaking the Christians I somehow broke myself?
At just fifteen years old I announced my retirement. Or so I thought. From the corps’ perspective I’d saved the world from another holy war and they wanted credit. More than that, they wanted a war hero and I was it so together we created “The Cult Hunter”. A picture of me sitting in a dark room breaking codes wasn’t the image they wanted as their new face for the cult hunter corps. According to the official press releases I was the prototype for the new cult hunter corps. They told the world I’d kicked in doors, jumped out of planes without a parachute and engaged in hand to hand combat with crazed Christians bent on destroying the world. They even released a couple of movies.
My role in breaking codes was almost an afterthought in the propaganda, which suited me.
You loved the deal they offered. You loved the idea of living behind a mask where you could hide your true role in all that death.
Once the initial public relations campaign was over the corps allowed me to finish a Ph.D. in History and announced my “retirement” to teaching where I would create future cult hunters for them.
Chapter Four
The morning tube to D.C. is right on schedule. The tube system is a remarkable invention, sort of like the centuries old mail tubes that were once used to move papers around buildings. Unlike the bumpy ride given to papers though, tube cars move at nearly one-thousand miles per hour using magnetic lifts and propulsion and have such good stabilizers you feel like you’re standing still.
I take a seat, close my eyes and wait. The only clue that we’re accelerating is the low pitched whistle of air followed by a slight pop as we enter the main tube and achieve full speed. I continue to sit with my eyes closed as others in the car carry on conversations. Now that the car is moving at the same speed as the air around us all there is to hear is a slight monotone hum. Our society prizes being monotone so I wait to hear what nobody else seems to hear. To increase efficiency cars will pull in close to each other and ride each other’s slip stream. There’s always a momentary pitch change when cars get close enough to break through the minor turbulence.
Good powers of observation sometimes create brain clutter too.
I caught a direct tube so the trip from Colorado to D.C. will take under two hours. As always, I brought along a small computer and plan to work on the final edits of a new book. My time at the corps still haunts me but at least it gave me material to turn into four best-selling books. I wrote the books to feature a nerdy puzzle master who puts together the pieces of Christian codes but a book where the primary action occurs in a dark room in the basement didn’t fit with the corps’ plan. By the time they were done “editing” the books featured a field agent who blows things up and sleeps with every beautiful women in sight. The few code breaking scenes that they allowed to slip through are closer to the truth than anyone would believe. I think part of me had hoped writing the books would purge me of the memories, like putting the words down in type would erase them from my mind. It didn’t work.
***
Riemann meets me at the tube station.
“Hey Cephas, thanks for coming,” he says.
“My pleasure, Bear.”
I gave Riemann the nickname “Bear” when we worked together and as always his dark hand envelopes mine as we greet each other. Luckily he also has a gentle demeanor and a light up the room smile so he comes off as charming rather than intimidating. Even so, I never told him his nickname was short for “Teddy bear”.
“Now I know something big is going down, you’ve never met me at the station before,” I reply.
Tilt head two degrees and release pressure on handshake prematurely.
“The boss wanted you to have a private hover car. He thought it would be a nice ‘welcome home’ gesture,” Riemann says.
Bear is a trained cult hunter but controlling inflections is not one of his strengths so his voice betrays him. This is something big.
Be nice. Don’t hit him yet.
I scan the station without even twitching my neck. To me the agents hiding in the station look like pieces that have been jammed into the wrong spot in a puzzle. The man on the balcony above us is given away when light glints off his earring which is a purple stone given to those who complete ten years in the cult hunter corps. There’s slight bulge of a weapon under the jacket of a woman pretending to watch a video screen ten meters to my right. A couple pretending to kiss to my left is really glancing at me and a young man directly ahead is simply staring straight at me.
Not yet.
As Riemann and I walk I see two more so I know they’ve sent a full kill team to watch over me. At least the puzzle of identifying them all keeps me entertained as we walk through the station.
“Is all this muscle here just for me?”
“Muscle? What do you mean?”
Now is good.
“I’ve found seven agents in the station so far. Tell me what’s happening or I’ll find a way to embarrass them.”
“Fine. We have a few people around. Can you just pretend this is a normal meeting between old friends and ignore the security? It’ll make more sense once you’re briefed.”
Cracked like an egg.
“It’s your show. Lead the way.”
As we reach the exit I pick out three more people who are watching us leave but don’t have the right demeanor to be from the corps. I say nothing to Riemann.
Are they security? Or are they the reason for the security?
***
We reach bureau headquarters without any problems and although Riemann heads straight for the elevators I choose to linger in the foyer for a moment. The foyer has massive windows and skylights that light up two brass emblems that are inlaid in the floor. The first emblem is the one the F.B.I. has used for over two hundred years, the second is the emblem of the Cult Hunter Corps. This is the only place where the sun touches the corps, the rest is hidden deep in the basement like a crazy old uncle. You never see him, but you’re never allowed to forget that he’s down there.
We take the elevator all the way to the bottom floor and I’m not surprised to find the place hasn’t changed a bit since I left. The hallways are cold and lifeless despite the dozens of people who scurry about with their heads down. One exception is a young agent who recognizes me and watches with his mouth open as we approach. I stop next to him and slowly turn my head to look at him.
“I was not here today. You did not see me. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir!”
They want persona? I’ll give them persona.
“Good thinking. I’ll make it a general order,” Riemann says as he walks me to the office of the director and turns to leave.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I wasn’t invited,” he says. “It’s above my pay grade.”
Seconds later the conference room door opens by itself. I’m expecting the usual affair with two dozen people seated around the massive table so I’m surprised to see just three. At the head of the table is the director, Henry Portman, a burly man with white skin but dark features and a face that’s been enhanced so many times there’s no telling how old he is or what he may have originally looked like. Henry’s eyes are harder to explain than most. If I describe my own eyes as having a twinkle of light then Henry’s could only be described as having a twinkle of darkness.
The man to Henry’s left is my old supervisor, Ray Lewis. Ray’s the deputy director for cultic affairs, which was Henry’s job before he became the director. Ray likes me because I based a character in my second book on him. He denies the book played any role in making him something of a rock star within the corps, but his office door has a small nameplate under the official one that bears the name of the book character. He now even changes his hair style daily, just like the alter ego I created for him.