Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  She steps closer to the screen.

  “So it’s not a rectangle. Cuboid. Rectangular prism.”

  “Cargo container is what us experts have been thinking.”

  She drops her head to one side.

  “I wish I had a robot.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She runs her knuckles across her lips, eyes still locked on the cuboid.

  “A robot on the ground. As opposed to the drone in the air. No need to send soldiers or, what do we call them now, war fighters, into iffy situations. Like to see if there are markings. Like to see if it’s been unsealed. How far to the road?”

  “There are a few poppy fields over that ridge. Some trails come west from there, continue about two klicks west of what we’re looking at. Cuboid. And joins a road. Dirt, but well traveled. For the area.”

  Jae steps back, squeezes herself.

  Her mental peripherals are picking up too many signals of ambient warfare. These young men and women are not playing video games, they are looking for things to blow up and/or kill. The longer she’s in here, the more a vision of this work is forcing its way into her mind. Waking in the morning. A trip to the bathroom. Peeing, washing up, brushing teeth. Breakfast with the family while still in PJs. Check email. Look at a few sites. Shower. Put on the uniform. Car. Stop for coffee. Burning your tongue with the first sip. Driving out to Creech. Situation updates. Into operations. Whoever had your chair on the night patrol uses something in his or her hair that seeped into the headrest. Smells like Aquanet, but who the fuck uses Aquanet anymore? A prayer to the lord that the fucking ground crew listened to what you reported about that balky aileron. If you have to fly that crate today and keep it in the air for twelve hours it’s gonna make your head split in two. And hours of boring your eyes into the screen, safe as houses, trying to give some poor fucking grunts on the ground twelve thousand kilometers away a little fucking air support that doesn’t cost the taxpayers too damn much.

  “I need to get out of here.”

  Exit procedures, and then the desert sunlight. Gooseflesh melted in an instant. Eyes sun-dazzled blind.

  Jae puts on her sunglasses.

  “Kontsern-Morinformsistema-Agat.”

  Cervantes is pulling his Randolph Engineering aviators from his right breast pocket. He pauses.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Your cuboid. It’s a Club-K cruise missile system made by Kontsern-Morinformsistema-Agat. Russian. Package fits in a shipping container. Targeting, launcher, missiles. Move it on rails, ships, trucks. Prep to launch in under five minutes.”

  Cervantes slips the dark lenses over his eyes.

  “Land to air?”

  Jae extends her index finger, launches it in a short arc, finds a target, her other fingers popping open in a silent and harmless explosion.

  “Yes. But the marketing videos tend to emphasize the fact that it can deploy four carrier-killers. In case you’re ever attacked by four aircraft carriers, I suppose.”

  He touches the arm of his sunglasses.

  “Shit.”

  “Could be bullshit. The marketing. But it’s there.”

  “The Lincoln is in the Arabian Sea.”

  “Too far.”

  He tips his head at the closed door of the command center.

  “Yeah, but the container isn’t there anymore. That was two days ago. When we expected you.”

  “And now?”

  He looks back at the sky.

  “We lost it.”

  With her knuckles, she wipes sweat from her upper lip.

  “Can we even do that anymore, lose things?”

  “Yeah. It takes effort, but we can.”

  She looks at the sweat on her knuckle.

  “Just about anything can get into Afghanistan from Russia using the reverse opium routes. And since Pakistan signed the APTTA, trade agreement, anything in Afghanistan can get across the southern border. That box could be buried fifty meters from where you saw it. Or it could be on a freighter docked at the port of Karachi, headed for a well-financed pirate enclave in Somalia.”

  He looks at her.

  She shrugs.

  “Far fetched. But possible. I get paid for the bad news.”

  She wipes some sweat from her forehead.

  “Could we go someplace out of the sun. Where the AC is set a little higher than fifty. I’ll be able to think better.”

  He looks at the H3 Tritium watch on his wrist.

  “We can debrief in the Warren. We’ve got a SCIF. Where your guy is supposed to meet you.”

  Jae looks at her boots.

  “My guy?”

  Cervantes points toward the electric cart he used to ferry her here from his office.

  “The one Kestrel is sending for you.”

  He walks to the cart and stands next to it, waiting.

  “We should shake it. I have to get some details before I kick this upstairs and tell them the Haqqani Network or some Somali pirates may be able to sink the USS Abraham fucking Lincoln.”

  She walks over, sits on the hot vinyl seat, and thinks about Terrence.

  The place where the future is made.

  Old man. Crazy old man. If he hadn’t walked into her office she’d still be at Berkeley, running her own lab by now, breathing down her grad students’ necks. As comfortably eccentric and doped-up as a campus will allow. Look at this, he’d said, handing her a satellite photo, tell me if you see anything. She’d seen something, alright, she’d seen a total absence of anything that suggested weapons of mass destruction. Yes, as he slipped the photo back into his briefcase, but most everyone else, talented people, saw something else. Then he’d offered her a job looking at things, part-time, paying the kind of money that could supplement her grants and actually prototype her robots.

  Then came Kestrel. A chance to put her robots in the field. Then came Iraq.

  And Haven.

  Cervantes drives her across the base to the cluster of intelligence workstations called the Warren, and the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at its heart. A theoretically unsurveillable chamber that one of Kestrel’s subsidiaries undoubtedly constructed. She thinks about who might be inside the SCIF, who Terrence might send to escort her on the contract he wants her to accept. She thinks about the implications of this escort.

  Bodyguard.

  She thinks about the implications of a bodyguard.

  Threats. Acquisitions.

  Terrence in her head.

  So many people will die. But not yet. Soon. But not yet. We can. Jae. We can stop it this time.

  the bruising world

  BEING INSIDE A SCIF is always, for Skinner, more than slightly disorienting.

  That they are generally very small, some no more than a moderate suburban closet, is comforting. Confinement reminds him agreeably of his early childhood. This confounded the therapists and doctors who made case studies of him after he was removed from his parents’ care. The working assumption seemed to have been that his experience should have been traumatizing, so much so that he must be taking refuge behind false memories of a pleasant childhood. What could possibly lie, many of them wondered, on the other side of that wall of false memory? What terrible horrors would require the construction of a virtual fortress of lies told by the self to the self so as to keep them at bay?

  Skinner, as an adult, was startled to think how completely those experts failed to put themselves into the minds of the children who were the subjects of their expertise. It was a failure not just of imagination but of basic principles. After all, what child wouldn’t, given the choice, elect to be the sole focus of his or her mother’s and father’s entire attention for every minute of every day?

  For good or ill.

  Children have little notion of the consequences of the most basic actions until they are taught to consider them. How could one be expected to comprehend the consequences of obsessive scrutiny. Unflagging guidance. Untiring experimentation. How could a child, a creature so unformed that
it can be conditioned to interpret a punch in the face as positive attention, be expected to understand the constant observation of his parents as anything but love? And how could that same child feel the removal from such a state as anything but a wrenching amputation of all that was warming and nurturing in the world?

  That they had missed the obvious was sometimes amusing to Skinner. His parents would never have missed such a connection. Parsers of details though they were, they would still have taken a moment to survey the forest before plunging into the trees for a closer look. Perhaps the experts missed the obvious because they failed to imagine the opposite case. Never considered the consequences of total parental neglect. The obvious negative to Skinner’s positive was in front of them, but they never looked to see. It seemed too banal, perhaps. Too normal to be worth investigating. Such was the case Skinner’s entire life, it seemed. A boy raised in a Skinner box is so much more exotic than another of the billions raised outside of one.

  So, inevitably, the tight quarters of a SCIF evoke a fraction of childhood comfort in him. Home, the close walls said. The perversity of the experience being that these rooms were constructed for the express purpose of barring any and all observation or surveillance. A SCIF was, by definition, the exact opposite of the environment he’d been raised in. The Skinner box his parents had built for him while his mother was still pregnant. The cocoon they had determined to place him in so as to better protect him from the bruising world, and to give them a perfect subject for their own work. Secretly constructed because, though both were muffled in distinct blankets of autism, they knew, even if they could not understand why, that no one would really approve of what they were doing. Indeed, they suspected, there might even be some slight legal consequences to their actions if they were discovered.

  They should have had a SCIF, Skinner thinks, one to contain their lives.

  Bored with ruminating on the past, he practices being invisible.

  He considers the interior of the SCIF. Four by four meters, a small table at the room’s center, four chairs, lighting from a sealed, battery-powered fixture over the table. The furniture is all made of a light plastic, off-white, slightly translucent, offering reassurance that it cannot conceal listening or recording devices.

  There is one door. Self-closing, with a single-use internal emergency release that must be entirely replaced if it is ever employed. Ventilation is achieved via a single duct, 50 x 50 centimeters. Somewhere along the length of the duct a section of nonconductive material will have been incorporated. A firebreak to prevent anyone from using the length of the duct as an antenna or to carry the uninterrupted vibrations of conversations taking place inside. A sealed cube, designed to reveal any efforts made to subvert its integrity. He is, to a certain extent, already invisible while he is within the SCIF. But with no one to observe him, can he indeed be invisible at all?

  He becomes blank. Expression leaches from his face and body, his stillness a reflection of the emptiness of the room. Invisibility. Privacy. Aloneness. He learned to construct them from within because they were not naturally available in the environment of the box. Later, he used this skill to kill people. And thinking about killing people he remains within himself a fraction of a moment beyond the point when an air force lieutenant colonel and a female civilian enter the SCIF, startling them both with his first words, neither of them having seen him until he speaks.

  He looks at the colonel, eyes skimming the man’s name tag.

  “Thank you, Colonel Cervantes.”

  The officer stops short, seeing Skinner for the first time, standing with the door of the SCIF wide open, an imperative no-no.

  The woman is looking past Skinner, as though trying to see the concealed trapdoor out of which he has just popped.

  Skinner pulls one of the chairs from the table.

  “There’s a clock running.”

  Cervantes looks at the woman.

  “I don’t have clearance for whatever this is.”

  She nods.

  “It’s okay.”

  He looks again at Skinner, points out the open door.

  “I’ll be outside. If you need anything.”

  Skinner pulls out a chair for himself.

  “Thank you.”

  Cervantes steps out of the open door, letting it close on the automatic mechanism, a loud clunk, as if something heavy had been dropped in an adjoining room, indicating that the bolts have shot home, sealing them in.

  Skinner looks at the woman. Jae. Terrence said her name is Jae. Disaster Robot Lady. One of Terrence’s people. And like all of Terrence’s oddities, there are stories about her. The Disaster Robot Lady finds things. Bodies in rubble. Survivors in wreckage. Weapons caches in satellite imaging. Patterns in randomness. She’s a finder.

  His asset. If he can convince her.

  “I need you to trust me.”

  At the word trust her hands begin moving from pocket to pocket, making an inventory, assuring herself that everything is in its place.

  “What does Cross want?”

  Skinner pictures his life aloft, the seven years of transience, sealed containers freighting him from airport to airport, hotel to hotel. An affair in Trieste, five days, his longest sustained contact in those years. Shifting his place on the globe. Dubai, yes. Moscow, yes. Also Albuquerque. Hull. Ontario, California, not Canada. Hotel fitness centers, airport business lounges, elevators with mirror-finish doors, backseats of hired cars with bottled water and copies of USA Today, the Herald Tribune, the London Times. Drinks presented on a tray, a selection of movies on seat-back screens, hot towel on takeoff and arrival. Cookies on pillows. A waitress in the hotel’s lobby bar, she gets off at midnight, no, that’s not too late to show you some clubs, Berlin wakes up at midnight. Her flat in the morning. Photo collage, two towels in the shower, one of them perpetually damp, ashtray full of the butts of cigarettes smoked with her last night, the empty bottles of Alsatian Riesling.

  And the temptation of dark alleys, bad neighborhoods, situations that suggest danger. The opportunity to be there, present, when circumstances veer suddenly from the norm, when someone finds himself caught in a tide of abrupt violence, the possibility of stepping into that tide, altering its course, bringing someone to shore safely. The will to ignore those alleys and streets, the telltales of hazard. Knowing that to take action is to leave a signature that can be read. Aware always of faraway people in office cubicles reviewing, studying, analyzing. The possibility that they might cut across a sign of Skinner. And so practicing invisibility on a grand scale, hovering, drifting, waiting for a signal, a tug on the string of his life’s balloon, pulled to earth by Terrence. Offering something, the only thing.

  A job.

  An asset.

  To make safe.

  And here she is, high-strung and exhausted, looking for any excuse to say no. He would not be surprised to find that she tastes danger in the air with the tip of her tongue. He takes the USB drive Terrence gave him from the breast pocket of his jacket, presents it between index and middle finger, and sets it on the table.

  “There has been an incident of cyber sabotage. Implications of international involvement. The contract is Kestrel. You find the badguys. I go with you.”

  She flicks the USB with a fingernail, sets it spinning.

  “And you do what?”

  “I’ll protect you.”

  She’s looking at him, eyes scanning back and forth as if reading or solving. Her eyes stop moving.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Skinner.”

  She gives the USB another flick, another, puts her finger on it to stop the spinning.

  “I’ve heard about you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are they true, the things I’ve heard?”

  “I don’t know. They might be.”

  She picks up the USB.

  “This?”

  He nods.

  “The job. Details. And Terrence said there was more in there. For you.”
>
  She holds it on her palm.

  “Did he.”

  He thinks about Cologne, Terrence touching his hand. Urgency. For her.

  “Yes. It seemed important.”

  She is balancing the drive on her hand, weighing it.

  “Skinner.”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes are moving over him again, the sentience of a hunting thing is behind them, a parasite intelligence living inside her. Palpable, her brilliance.

  “People are afraid of you, Skinner.”

  He doesn’t know what she’s seeing, finds himself wanting to become invisible before she discovers too much. But doesn’t.

  “When I do my job, yes, they are.”

  Her hand closes over the USB, her eyes stop looking for him.

  “I like that.”

  She rises.

  “I need things from the place I was staying.”

  Back in the sun, Skinner following Jae, walking toward the parking lot, beyond her, the landing strip where the winged shark silhouette of a Predator is taking flight on a training run. Practice over the deserts of home. His asset ahead of him, unsafe, drawing unrest and danger.

  Seven years after he left and his heart stopped in his chest, Skinner feels it begin to beat again.

  rubble

  JAE MET HAVEN in post-invasion Iraq.

  She was there as a rescue worker. Running her robots through mountains of man made rubble, searching for collateral survivors. A Kestrel initiative financed by cash gushing from the reconstruction pipeline. One of the hundreds of small operations meant to show the locals that the Americans were really there to help after all. As advertised by red, white, and blue flag stickers plastered over all of her equipment. That was the cover. The op, her first in the field, was concerned with mapping connections between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda in Iraq’s IED supply chain.

  Terrence had conceived the original contract and sold it to the CIA. Jae to be set loose in a database of Top Secret files, tracing a configuration that could concretely establish the flow of explosives and weapons from Iran into Iraq. Evidence to be used in backroom negotiations with Shiite insurgents who would rather their native supporters not know how beholden they were to a foreign government. And so it had progressed for six months, fruitlessly. Yet another of Terrence’s ops that seemed born to wither in the year that Cross began to challenge him for control of Kestrel. And, indeed, it was Cross, after he had wrested the company from Terrence’s hands, who proposed that Jae should take the op to Iraq.