Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  Sudhir is smiling.

  “Billions will be enough. One dead policeman, wallowing in evil, against dead billions. One terrible death.”

  He fills his cheeks with air, blows.

  “Light enough. I can carry his death.”

  He looks at the wrapped body on the floor.

  “And also I’ll have to carry him.”

  Taji squirms and Raj’s mother shifts her to her other arm.

  “Bigger and bigger, little girl.”

  Sudhir is still looking at the body.

  “No squirming for this one.”

  The door opens, and Raj’s father stands there looking at the shrouded dead body on his floor.

  His wife begins filling a kettle.

  “Tea.”

  He steps inside, eyes still on the body, closing the door.

  “No. No time.”

  But she has stoked the coals in the little orange stove already.

  “There is always time for tea.”

  He looks from the body to Raj.

  “Have you found it?”

  For a moment Raj thinks he is talking about evil; has Raj found evil yet. Has he? He has seen a man beaten to death for his religion. A woman disfigured by acid thrown in her face by her husband after she’d been raped by a gang. Those are almost the worst things he has ever seen. Far worse than the dead policeman with the little hole in his cheek. The worst thing that he has seen is the body of an infant, starved to death. He has seen three of those. His father says these things happen not because of evil but because of ignorance and greed. His mother makes that sound in her nose when his father talks like that. Raj doesn’t know if he has found evil yet, but he wishes sometimes for a hammer, to smash the faces of ignorance and greed. Or a magic gun, to point at them, pull the trigger, and see them disappear. No more starved babies in the gutter.

  But his father is not talking about evil, he is talking about the World Wide Web.

  Raj turns his attention to the open laptop on the table.

  “The site, yes, but there are so many posts, and you have to log in as a member to use the search function. And the bhenchod power keeps cutting off.”

  His father takes off his glasses, wipes them on the tail of his shirt, one of the few patches of fabric not smeared with grease from the work being done in #1 Shed.

  “The power will be fixed soon.”

  He puts on his glasses and reaches into his back pocket and takes out a small blue notebook, sweat-stained, curved to match the shape of his bottom.

  “A member account.”

  He thumbs through the pages of the notebook, finds what he wants.

  “Try this. Member name merckxmaniac7. Spell merckx with a cee, kay, and ex at the end. All one word, all lower case, merckxmaniac7. And password helix00. No spaces, lower case.”

  Raj types the name and password into the appropriate boxes and hits enter.

  “Yes, okay.”

  His father reads something else from the notebook.

  “Search now for terms Merckx, Leader, geometry.”

  Raj types, has to delete a few letters when he misspells Merckx, retypes, hits enter.

  “Yes, okay, one post, two replies.”

  “Okay, yes.”

  “The post asks if anyone knows the head tube and seat tube angles for a sixty-centimeter, nineteen ninety-two MX Leader frame. The first response asks please for no questions regarding bikes newer than nineteen eighty-three on this forum. The second response is addressed to the first responder and says that he should not take things so seriously. And that is all.”

  Eyes in the notebook, his father steps over the dead body, coming to the table.

  “Respond.”

  Raj clicks a button, opens a box for responses.

  “Yes.”

  “Reply. No geometry charts for that year. Did my own and came up with HT: 73 degrees and ST: 72.5 on a 48cm frame with 53cm TT, 12spd. By the way, for sale, two 1948 CDF Concours. Read it back.”

  Raj reads it back, his father nods, and Raj hits the post button.

  His father closes his notebook and slips it into his back pocket.

  “And this is how we hope to become secure.”

  Sudhir squats next to the dead man.

  “How, perhaps, we invite the devil.”

  He rubs his hands together, pulls the corpse, still somewhat flexible, into a seated position, and heaves it onto his shoulder, straightening.

  “If someone could get the door.”

  Raj’s mother opens it, looks out.

  “There are people.”

  He nods.

  “There are always people in the city. Killing him was important. Hiding his death doesn’t matter.”

  He steps to the door, stops, and looks at Raj’s father.

  “More police soon. And the Sena will come. And the water goons are giving much trouble.”

  His father looks around the room. His son at the laptop sending secret messages, his wife making tea, his daughter asleep. He takes off his glasses, tries again to clean them on his dirty shirt.

  “Three more days. I think.”

  Sudhir adjusts his burden.

  “Our policeman will need more money to stuff into loud mouths.”

  Raj’s father frowns at his glasses.

  “Money we have. Time we need. Takshak from the gangwar has phone cards. Prepay. Ten thousand rupees each. Tell him you want a hundred of them. For the policeman. Gifts for his friends at the station. Better than cash.”

  Sudhir dips his knees in Raj’s mother’s direction and steps out into the alley, heading toward the mire at the edge of the neighborhood, where uneatable offal and human waste are dumped. Two of his men join him; they still wear clothes meant as slum camouflage, but they have started to carry their weapons openly since Sudhir killed the policeman that morning. Machine pistols, assault rifles, bandoleers of grenades, daypacks stuffed with extra clips, ration packets, maps, and dozens of batteries for the cell phones and GPS units they all have on their belts.

  Raj’s father starts for the door.

  “Check the bicycle site several times an hour, Raj. And move to the Number One Shed. The generators will keep you online. Soon the media center will be finished and you will need to help your friends.”

  “Tea, Aasif.”

  He looks at his wife.

  “No time.”

  He smiles.

  “Not even for tea.”

  She takes the dirty glasses from his hands, rubs them with her sari, places them on his face.

  “I will bring you tea. But you come home for dinner.”

  He shrugs, neither yes nor no, kisses her, his dark wife, and leaves.

  Raj gets up from the table.

  “He wants me in the shed.”

  She looks at him, nods.

  “Take this.”

  She pours tea into a thermos, hangs two cups from the handle.

  Raj fumbles with the door latch, tea thermos in one hand, laptop in the other, and she reaches over to open it for him.

  “Rajiv.”

  He looks up at her.

  “Mom.”

  She frowns.

  “Do not fall in the water.”

  He looks out the door.

  “There is no water.”

  She shakes her head.

  “It is everywhere, Rajiv.”

  She bends and kisses his head.

  “And it is deep.”

  He kicks a toe against the floor.

  “I know how to swim.”

  She straightens.

  “Tea for your father. I’ll come later with dinner.”

  He smiles and turns and runs, opposite the direction Sudhir took the dead gangster cop, away from the mire at that edge of the neighborhood, but there is more where he is running, more in every direction.

  She closes the door. Taj is making noises, waking hungry, so she feeds her daughter.

  remnant of the blade

  SMITH WANTS TO stay and put out the fi
re that is growing from the burning corpse, feasting on the scattered trash inside the condo, flaring uncontrollably when it discovers the paint thinner rags near the unfinished mural. Skinner is more inclined to feed the flames and increase any chances that the entire building will be raging out of control before fire fighters can arrive. But there isn’t time for either of their wishes to be granted. Smith is looping, the same illogical thought returning to its point of origin over and over, repeating. That thought leapt the gaps in his rationality when he saw the charred skin on the corpse outside the door to his apartment.

  What did they want?

  This originating interrogatory leading to a conclusion that he voiced himself.

  They wanted to kill us.

  Leading to the irrational feedback loop.

  I’ll just stay here and put the fire out.

  Over and over until they get him to the car and Jae digs a pill bottle from her duffel and forces him to swallow a two-milligram bar of Xanax. Then, considering his bulk, makes him take another. The Xanax begins to take visible hold of Smith thirty minutes later, after Skinner has checked them into the Sleep Inn on Thirty-sixth Street along the northern edge of Miami International. With the door locked and blinds drawn, and the AC humming at full blast, Smith has settled himself into the pillows on one of the twin beds, taken his phone from his pocket, and started playing Plants vs. Zombies.

  Skinner begins thinking about money.

  He has two hidden accounts, one at a bank on the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the Channel Islands, the second held by a shell corporation headquartered in a small house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that serves as the physical address for over two thousand other shells. Using the Kestrel Dynamics corporate Amex number from the USB, he books two business-class seats, a single night in the Heathrow Hilton, and a connection to Kiev. Then he uses his Cheyenne shell account to purchase two more business-class seats to Stockholm, also with a connection in Heathrow, but without an overnight stay.

  Smith can’t go with them. Even if his agoraphobia could be conquered to the point of getting him on a plane, his lack of a passport rules out the option. Jae wants to talk about where he can go to ground, but Smith already has a place, a safehouse. A location he will not share with them, but a protocol is agreed upon for future communications. Before saying good-bye, he accepts the rest of the Xanax and agrees to take care of Jae’s robots after she unpacks just two of the spiders, encased in padded shells, and repacks them in her duffel bag.

  On departure, Sinner watches as Jae hugs Smith, an apology of some kind quietly spoken. But Smith, whether by nature or because of the Xanax he has taken, waves her off. Last seen through the closing hotel room door, thumbs tapping the screen of his phone, killing zombies.

  On the flight Jae seems to black out rather than fall asleep. Skinner, unable to sleep himself, makes an effort to meditate, tilting his seat back and consciously relaxing his muscles one by one, beginning in his toes. Musculature relaxed, he knows he can recover some amount of physical, if not mental, energy. Indeed, his mind circles again and again to the encounter incident in Oasis Two. At the hotel he asked Smith about the tracer rounds. Those were the bullets I had around the place, man. No explanation as to why he happened to have tracers rolling loose in a drawer. Skinner replays the moves he made killing the first man. He could have done better. He rehearses doing it better.

  When he opens his eyes he discovers that Jae has unzipped her carryon backpack, taken out her laptop, and is exploring the Kestrel USB.

  “Partition.”

  Skinner rubs his eyes.

  She points at the USB.

  “Smith said the hackers put the ReStuxnet virus on a partition on a USB. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  She clicks through a series of control panels for the software preinstalled on the USB.

  “Asshole. There you are.”

  Click-click-click. And the screen begins to spool an unending list of files.

  Text files in a dozen formats, spreadsheets, link dumps, JPEGs, GIFs, the contents of several email account trash files, a seemingly unending document composed of cut-and-pastes from defense industry trade collateral, technical PDFs on mil spec office furniture, the entire WikiLeaks State Department cable dump, more.

  Jae points at Skinner’s briefcase, tucked under the seat in front of him.

  “I’ll need your laptop.”

  She’s begun to click open files, apparently at random, placing her phone on the tray table and opening a browser.

  Skinner pulls out his laptop.

  Jae waves fingers, vague, presence receding.

  “Open a browser. Firefox if you have it. Anything if not.”

  He opens Explorer, and she takes the laptop from him, rests it at an angle on her thigh.

  “Terrence. What did you? Everything. Okay. X marks the spot. Show me.”

  Clicking through files, hands dancing between phone and computers, surfing across the information, no longer, Skinner would swear, on the plane at all, silent other than the occasional grunt or mumble.

  “Show me where.”

  Until she snaps to awareness as they stand inside Heathrow Terminal 3, trying to decide between eating at the British version of a bagel café (East Village Veggie, Harlem Nights, The Soho) or a chain sushi bar with a kimono-wearing cartoon tuna as its logo.

  “Who were they?”

  Skinner pictures briefly the men he killed at Oasis Two.

  “Contractors. From a Kestrel rival. H-A, perhaps. Smith said they have an interest in him. They could have his home under surveillance.”

  “Why didn’t they have guns?”

  Skinner frowns at the smiling face of the tuna, the oversize chopsticks clutched somehow in one of its fins.

  “Because they didn’t expect to have to shoot anyone.”

  He looks at a nearby departures board. They have only an hour before their scheduled boarding time.

  “I think these are the best options we have for now.”

  “How were they going to kill me? Without guns? I know there are other options. But.”

  Skinner nods at the Bagel Street franchise.

  “This one has an espresso machine.”

  Jae resettles her backpack on her shoulders.

  “Right.”

  They wait for something resembling a break in the human traffic flowing along the aisle running between the façades of the shops and the cluster of seats where they have pulled over, and then step in and dodge their way across before sidling into line behind a man speaking rapid-fire Cantonese into his phone.

  Skinner turns slightly, watching the constantly shifting mosaic of faces outside.

  “They weren’t supposed to kill you. They were there to take you.”

  Jae looks at the tubs of flavored cream cheese spreads behind a sneeze glass. She shakes her head, as if denying the unnatural color spectrum of the spreads.

  “Take?”

  “Capture. Kidnap.”

  She pats her pockets.

  “How do you know?”

  He studies the list of paninis that are offered as dubious alternatives to the bagels.

  “Because they didn’t have guns.”

  She looks from the tubs of spreads to his face.

  “I don’t want any of this shit.”

  As she says it they come to the front of the line and Skinner orders for them.

  Minutes of silence later, at their table, Jae crumples the paper around the remaining three-quarters of her bagel after she’s consumed as much as she seems willing to consume.

  “Why would they kidnap me?”

  “They’d have kidnapped you for ransom.”

  “Money? From Cross?”

  “Information, maybe. Or a promise to stay out of the way. In the past, nobles were taken in battle and held until the foe retired from the field.”

  She takes a sip of her coffee, winces at its intense bitterness, and picks through the remains of their meal until she finds an unopened sugar pack
et.

  “They thought they could use me to get Cross to stop looking for the hackers? Leave them with one less competitor trying to get the inside track on new cyber security contracts?”

  “Maybe. That’s one possible motive, if it was a kidnap scenario.”

  She rips open the packet.

  “If?”

  He begins to place the paper wrappers and assorted trash onto their plastic tray.

  “Kidnap was one possibility, capture was the other.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Skinner picks up his own very small paper cup, looks at the dregs of black, unsweetened espresso at its bottom, swirls it.

  “A capture scenario is usually terminal.”

  Jae is pouring the sugar into her cup, watching it dissolve into slush.

  “I don’t find euphemisms comforting. They’re too ominous. I’d much rather you just say, When they capture you they kill you.”

  “Torture. Then kill.”

  She watches the small pile of sugar at the bottom of her cup subside under the surface of the coffee, but she says nothing.

  Skinner drinks off the last of his own double shot, places the empty cup on the tray.

  “Capture and interrogation. Which almost inevitably means some form of torture.”

  She pushes air out between pursed lips, lets it drift back in, picks up a wooden stirrer and creates a tiny whirlpool at the bottom of her cup.

  “So they were there to capture, torture, and kill me.”

  She drops the stirrer and drinks the last of her espresso like it’s a tumbler of bourbon. Sets the cup on the tray, looks at Skinner.

  “What about you?”

  “They didn’t know about me. Clearly.”

  She wipes her lips with a used napkin from the tray.

  “But they know now, whoever sent them.”

  Skinner lifts his hands from the table, then sets them back down.

  “Whoever sent them knew already, they just didn’t tell the team they sent to take you.”

  Jae balls the napkin.

  “Fucking spy shit.”

  Skinner draws lines on the tabletop with his fingertips, random shapes, demonstrating nothing, routes for his thoughts.

  “The team was told you were a low value asset, unprotected. No reason to take the risk of carrying guns. Carrying guns in a country of laws is always a risk best avoided. Especially in a country where the police forces are armed. They were to take you, probably they had a ruse in mind. A story to tell about building safety or needing to move your car, something to get you out of the tower. The ruse failing, they had tasers. But you are not a low value asset. Anyone sending a team after you knows the stakes involved and knows your value to Cross. You are highest value. And are, therefore, protected. But they sent a poorly armed and ill prepared team to acquire you. Because they wanted to know something specific.”