The Traveler

Eventually General Nash called Lawrence into his office and gave him what the Brethren called “the Knowledge.” He was told the most basic version: that there was a terrorist group called the Harlequins who protected heretics called Travelers. For the health of society, it was important to destroy the Harlequins and control the visionaries. Lawrence went back to his workstation with his first Brethren access codes, typed his father’s name into the information database, and received his revelation. NAME: Sparrow. AKA: Hiroshi Furukawa. SUMMARY: Known Japanese Harlequin. RESOURCES: Level 2. EFFECTIVENESS: Level 1. CURRENT STATUS: Terminated-Osaka Hotel-1975.

As Lawrence was given more of the Knowledge and a larger range of access codes, he discovered that most of the Harlequins had been destroyed by Brethren mercenaries. Now he was working for the forces that had murdered his father. The evil surrounded him, but like a Noh actor he kept his mask on at all times.

When Kennard Nash left the White House, Lawrence followed him to a new job at the Evergreen Foundation. He was allowed to read the Green, Red, and Blue books that described the Travelers and Harlequins and that gave a short history of the Brethren. In this new age, the Brethren rejected the brutal totalitarian control of Stalin and Hitler for the more sophisticated Panopticon system developed by the eighteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

“You don’t need to watch everyone if everyone believes they’re being watched,” Nash explained. “Punishment isn’t necessary, but the inevitability of punishment has to be programmed into the brain.”

Bentham had believed that the soul didn’t exist and there was no reality other than the physical world. Upon his death, he promised to leave his fortune to the University of London if his body was preserved, dressed in his favorite clothes, and placed in a glass case. The philosopher’s body was a private shrine for the Brethren, and they all made a point to see it whenever they were visiting London.

A year ago, Lawrence had flown to Amsterdam for a meeting with one of the Brethren’s Internet monitoring teams. He had a one-day layover in London and took a taxi to the University College London. Entering from Gower Street, he walked across the main quadrangle. It was late in the summer and quite warm. Students wearing shorts and T-shirts were sitting on the white marble steps of the Wilkins Building and Lawrence felt jealous of their casual freedom.

Bentham sat on a chair inside a glass-and-wood display case at the entrance to the south cloister. His skeleton had been stripped of flesh, padded with straw and cotton wool, and then dressed in the philosopher’s clothes. The philosopher’s head had been kept in a container placed at his feet, but students had stolen it for football games on the quadrangle. Now the head was gone, stored in the university’s vault. A wax face had been substituted, and it had a pale, ghostly appearance.

Normally a college security guard sat in an identical wood-and-glass case about twenty feet away from the philosopher. Brethren paying homage to the inventor of the Panopticon used to joke that it was impossible to know who was more dead-Jeremy Bentham or the obedient drone who watched his body. But that particular afternoon, the guard had vanished and Lawrence was alone in the hall. Slowly he approached the display case and stared at the wax face. The French sculptor who had created the face had done a particularly good job, and the slight upward curve of Bentham’s lip suggested that he was quite satisfied with the progress of the new millennium.

After staring at the preserved body for a few seconds, Lawrence stepped to the left to study a small exhibit about Bentham’s life. He glanced down and saw graffiti scrawled with a red grease pencil on the tarnished brass molding at the bottom edge of the case. It was an oval shape and three straight lines; Lawrence knew from his research that it was a Harlequin’s lute.

Was it a gesture of contempt? A defiant statement from the opposition? Crouching down, he studied the mark closer and saw that one of the lines was an arrow pointing toward Bentham’s padded skeleton. A sign. A message. He looked down the cloister hallway at a distant tapestry. A door slammed somewhere in the building, but no one appeared.

Do something, he thought. This is your only chance. The door of the display case was fastened with a small brass padlock, but he pulled it hard and ripped off the latch. When the door squeaked open, he reached inside and searched the outer pockets of Bentham’s black coat. Nothing. Lawrence opened the coat, touched cotton padding, then found an inside pocket. Something was there. A card. Yes, a postcard. He concealed the prize within his briefcase, shut the glass door, and walked quickly away.