Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  Was he planning all that time? Did he already know Sudhir? Did it begin in school when he first had access to the Internet? Slow to come to India, wholly adopted, like all modern things, once it arrived. Did he find Sudhir himself? The ship breakers? Did he begin this plan? Or did the plan find him?

  Or was there no plan?

  Just his father’s love of the slum and desire to make it better. Safer. And the rest happening as life happens. A truck loaded with shit.

  Raj is hurrying to the shed through his neighborhood, changing so fast in these few days. Populations shifting, the wires spreading. The electricity goons his father has been slowly educating over the years, slipping it into their ears like gentle poison, the safe essentials of their racket, are doing much of that work now. Plan or happenstance? And this neighborhood of his, Dharavi Nagar, a little more than six hectares of squalor and enterprise and shoddy construction and disease and color and filth and children playing in the streets and dirty water and bare feet and the stink that never goes away, Sector Six in the Redevelopment Project, home to more than two hundred thousand people. Is it plan or chance that it is just north of Sector Five, where the developers who bought the first DRP contracts have already begun to clear shanties in preparation for building the first phase?

  Close to #1 Shed now, jungle men in their harnesses of weapons. More of them. Women, too. Tamil spoken with rural accents. Well schooled in walking silently, creeping around corners, sitting still in muddy ditches, waiting for days without food, sleeping on rocks, schooled also in guns and explosives. Here to bring their jungle fight to the city. The slum. They know Raj, a small shrug of acknowledgment, hands never leaving weapons. Mostly AK-47s. Jungle gun. Raj has seen them so many times in movies. Usually the gun the badguys are using.

  More guards outside the shed. One of them smiles.

  “Rajiv. Little engineer.”

  He lays out his palm and Raj slaps it, following with a fist bump.

  The guard bangs on the shed door.

  “Rain. We’re all gonna get wet.”

  Raj looks up at the low sky.

  “Not yet.”

  The guard looks up, nods.

  “Not yet. But soon, little engineer. Very wet, very soon.”

  The door swings open, unlocked and pushed outward by one of the guards inside. Activity within, under the bright fluorescents his father installed after they covered the skylights with boards and tarps just before the truck arrived. The diesel tractor is gone, being put to other uses, but the container that was hauled by hand and rope through the rain and mud is still here, though cut down. That had been the only way to get access to the load. They didn’t have the equipment or manpower to take it off the truck. It rests on now on railroad ties, waiting to be more firmly seated before it can be fired.

  Soon.

  It will happen soon.

  Like the rain.

  So much happening at once. The new machinery, rusty, seized up, liters of solvent and grease and oil are being applied. Coils of wire, great pythons of it, are being woven by hand from the cables that the electricity goons have been cutting down on nighttime raids in the suburbs. Gun classes, larger versions of the tutorial his father gave him at home. There, far end of the shed, jungle fighters, and slummies who have, almost to a man, never held a gun. David’s father is there. His faith in the DRP is great, his faith in Raj’s father is greater. His best friend from childhood, his educated friend who could have gone on to such very big things but stayed in his shanty down the street instead. How not to follow him where he is leading?

  Raj goes to his seat at the new media workstation. His friends are here, too. Working. The kids all have jobs now. Tea wallah, lunch wallah, computer wallah, phone wallah, wire wallah, IT wallah, charger wallah. So much work. Under the table, where his toes can find it and roll it foot to foot, the soccer ball. He opens the laptop. He has a user account now, a password. He logs in. Last session still active. Twitter feeds. News. Classicsteelbikes.com. Still no reply to his reply. Has it been read by someone? By whoever is meant to read it? He has another message ready. Memorized, taught to him by his father who told him that he must post it the moment he sees the reply. No asking, just post it and tell him after. Speed is important in all things now. This rush of events and change. The modern racing by. World class is not slow. Fast. A race to be there before anyone else. What will it look like when it is reached?

  This thing they are building, this fight they are starting.

  Raj opens a small window, Twitter, Kalki Koechlin, it makes him wish he knew how to read French. She mostly tweets in English, but sometimes in French. Those ones look more personal. He’s never tweeted anything directly to her. Or anyone else. He doesn’t have an account. He’d never seen Twitter for himself until the last twenty-four hours. It’s like listening to one side of a hundred different conversations being conducted with one person. He tries not to get too distracted by it, but it sounds like another world, and he wants to know what’s happening inside of it. How different will it be? Sudhir says they might change everything. That nothing can be the same after they begin. The world will change, is changing. He says that they are a sign of the change. Too late to hold it back. But what will the world be like? Will the world become so different that there are no more movie stars? Raj tries to imagine that, but it doesn’t seem possible, so he does an image search and looks at pictures of Kalki instead.

  Rain starts to fall, hitting the tarps overhead like little bombs. When the deluge comes they have to raise their voices to be heard inside the shed, becoming louder and louder, until they are all yelling. Urgent to be heard and understood.

  lonely house

  NIGHT TRAIN TO Copenhagen.

  First stop at the Hellsten. Jae repacks her essentials in her backpack, making room for Skinner’s laptop and the two phones they took from the man outside the Scandic hotel. Skinner transfers his own necessaries into the pockets of his suit and trench coat. Chargers, pen, notebook, sunglasses, passport, an alternative set of ID, cash, phone. Slipping into the bathroom, he takes the Bersa from his pocket and looks at it for the first time since he used it to kill Lentz seven years ago. He fingers the scuffs along the barrel and the polymer grips on the left side, remembers skimming the pistol over the stone flags into the mouth of the mausoleum. Terrence’s gift to him, delivered by the old man from the tomb of Lazarous.

  Cross told Jae that Terrence was dead. Skinner tries to think of reasons why he would lie about such a thing. But Skinner cannot imagine Cross risking such a lie. Terrence is dead. Killed in Cologne soon after he talked to Skinner. Soon after he brought Skinner to the surface, when they were done with him at last.

  He washes his face. Drying, his fingers graze his lips. The kiss. She kissed him. Dumbfounding, this world.

  Checking out, a request that their luggage be stored until they can send for it. Room charged to Skinner’s travel ID, nothing left to hide from anyone here. Oh, and would they happen to have a ruler he could borrow? Yes, a red one, translucent plastic. Skinner slips the ruler into a jacket pocket and walks out with it. A straightedge can be such a useful thing.

  Stockholm Central Station, bedlam contained, society not yet crumbling, but there are runs on bottled water, snack foods, and celebrity gossip magazines. Mostly it’s a matter of waiting in lines.

  At the ticket counter. Swedish is not one of Skinner’s languages, but English is spoken here. A stressed and tired man in his forties, loyal employee of SJ, doing his best, haggard. Skinner uses manners, impeccable, please and thank you, patient acknowledgment of these impossible circumstances, and can we possibly get to Paris? No. Impossible. Unfortunate. Disappointing. The people at the head of the line behind them creep closer, is it their turn yet? Urgency. So, no Paris. How close, then? Copenhagen. Twelve hundred kilometers short of their destination, but a volcano is erupting. Adaptation. Two for Copenhagen. There are no tickets on the night train, one assumes? One is wrong in this case. But only private compartmen
ts remain; more economical seats and berths have been taken. If the expense must be borne, it must be borne. A private sleeping compartment? Yes, thank you. SEK 3,200. Cash is accepted? Yes, it is. Better and better. Train departing at 2214, transfer in Lund at 0612, arrival in Copenhagen at 0728.

  Your tickets, sir.

  Another line for the shops. Batteries for Jae, AA, AAA, and a new pack of travel adapters. For Skinner, D batteries and a pair of long compression socks meant to reduce the probability of blood clots when seated for long periods of time. Water, bags of nuts, dried fruit, sandwiches in plastic triangles.

  Cold on the platform, lines of track stretching north and south out of the yards behind the station. Shifting herds on the platform. Do we wait here or there? Is this a ticket for a reserved seat? Dining car? I can’t remember the last time I took a train. Skinner keeps Jae away from the edge of the platform. A reserved compartment, they have no need to jockey for position. Just stand together in the cold and wait. And a realization for Skinner, she still has his scarf, inside her mountaineering jacket, red wool at her neck. Some meaning there related to the kiss, but in a code he cannot unscramble. A tether is what it feels like, his scarf around her neck, preventing either of them from falling off the mountain alone.

  The train, somehow, is on time.

  Night train to Copenhagen.

  In their compartment Jae is immediately plugged, charging, and online. Her Toughbook and Skinner’s laptop open on the surface of the tiny flip-up table at the window, her phone between them, all plugged into the socket below the table, a small bristle of adapters. The two stolen phones are dying, cableless, she ekes from them their last tendrils of connectivity to keep as many channels of information flowing as possible.

  Left to his own devices, Skinner turns inward. Stretched on the lower of two bunks, he leaves the train, races ahead of it to the cemetery at Montmartre. From above, he studies the ground where he was meant to be killed years before. The design Terrence created to keep him alive. Haven should have been there. Any serious attempt on his life should have begun and ended with Haven. But only three people would truly have understood that. Terrence, Skinner, and Haven himself. Did Haven know about the attempt? Did he try to force his own involvement and find himself rebuffed? Or did he, seeing what Terrence was about, make no effort to convince Cross that the attempt would almost certainly fail? Haven was capable, quite literally, of anything.

  Jae is looking at him.

  Skinner sits up.

  “Yes?”

  She points at her laptop.

  “It’s on the blogs.”

  Skinner shakes his head.

  “Blogs?”

  She angles a screen in his direction, a Tumblr blog, some abstract graphics running up and down the borders, red and green lines twisting at right angles, vaguely techno, a thick column of white text on a black background in the middle. Jae scrolls up a bit.

  “West-Tebrum. The attack. It started in the comments section. Someone asking if anyone else had heard about an attack on the grid. Gets mostly pooh-poohed. But someone picks it up, says they heard about it, too. Connects it to the generator that blew at West-Tebrum. Implications of secret knowledge. This guy I know in the “community.” So now someone does an actual post, either aggregating a bunch of comments from various other blogs or after doing some kind of half-assed research. Written up kind of like blind-item gossip. People in the know are asking what caused that blackout in the Philadelphia suburbs. Builds a hypothetical scenario that’s not too far from the truth. It’s spreading.”

  Skinner’s eyes skim the blog entry.

  “Mainstream?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Not yet. But between Kestrel and the other contractors and the military and intel agencies, there are a fuckload of people trying to track ReStuxnet. Hackers can be a gabby lot. Frankly, I’m surprised the lid has stayed on this long. Figure the big security blogs, Danger Room and company, they’ll already have picked up at least this much and be beating the bushes for more. After that, it hits the tech blogs on mainstream news sites. Questions start coming from the New York Times, CNN, Guardian, AP. Then Homeland will have to have some kind of response, even if it’s no comment. Once that response is in, it goes front-page. Twenty-four hours from now. Less, maybe. Probably. Soon it will break that the generator failed and people died in the blackout because of a computer worm that killed a lube oil motor. At that point the story goes from Cyber Security Breach at Power Plant to Deadly Terrorist Attack on US Soil.”

  She picks up the two stolen phones.

  “These are dead.”

  Skinner nods, rises, takes them from her. The window will only open two inches, but that’s more than enough to slip the two phones out.

  He closes the window.

  “Did Terrence do it?”

  “Run the West-Tebrum attack?”

  Skinner nods.

  Jae looks at the screens of the two open laptops. The blog on his and a checkerboard of open files on her Toughbook.

  “Yeah. I mean no. I mean, I don’t know. He was involved. He was connected to Shiva somehow. Shit, he could have been Shiva. But I doubt that. He. He was building something. A new network, maybe. A replacement for Kestrel, maybe. I don’t. Shit.”

  She puts a hand on each open screen, pauses, and folds them both.

  “Nuclear proliferation overlays.”

  She stands.

  “Corn and wheat price indexes.”

  She stretches her arms over her head, her back and neck popping.

  “Peak oil timetables.”

  She lowers her arms, shakes her hands violently, fingers slapping against one another.

  “Urbanization of population.”

  Lifts one knee high, puts it down, lifts the other.

  “Aging of population.”

  She takes off her jacket and drops it on the floor.

  “Wi-Fi penetration in developing countries.”

  She walks to the door, four steps, turns, walks back to the table, bigger steps, three.

  “Brazilian favelas and the global GDP, contributions to.”

  She raises a hand to her brow, screens her eyes as if the overhead light in its translucent white shell has suddenly begun to hurt them.

  “Coal-fired power plant construction starts, China, two thousand fifteen projections.”

  She flicks a finger at the light switch near the door, a button that looks at though it should summon a white plastic elevator designed by Apple engineers.

  “Turn that off, please.”

  Skinner touches the button, slightest of clicks, darkness. There are stars outside the window that come into view as their eyes adjust. Some light creeps under the door from the corridor, very little, night train, sleeper car. The screen of Jae’s rugged phone gives off a dull gray glow.

  Her hand appears in that graveyard corona, zombie pallor, and flips the phone screen down on the table.

  “Ice cap melt rates.”

  She is silhouetted against the field of stars and a stutter of black shadows, leafless trees, streaming past outside.

  “Critical foreign dependencies, map of.”

  She turns so that she is facing the window, back to Skinner.

  “Black swan weather events. Somali pirate havens. Bilderberg, history of. Chinese yuan, deflation of. New American isolationism, rise of. Russian nationalism, rise of. Gray market economy and global GDP, percentage of. Gulf Stream, warming of. Mexico City slum properties, real estate value of. US health care costs and global economic growth, inhibition of.”

  She stops. The train rolls over the tracks. Smooth, a sound that seems more electronic than mechanical. Lights whip past, lonely house in a barren field. Summer soon. It will be green everywhere when it comes. Jae touches the window. Cold enough outside that the warmth of her fingers creates tiny halos of condensation around the tips.

  “It looks like Terrence was anticipating the apocalypse. Which I guess he always was. Always looking for op
portunities to put it off.”

  Skinner has a vision of Terrence, wild eyed, a tattered robe, raving on a street corner. But the image doesn’t last, won’t sustain.

  “So he was funding anarchists?”

  Jae’s silhouette shrugs.

  “It looks possible. Material he dumped in the USB about Bilderberg. The WTO. Demonstrations at the last several G8 conferences. Twenty-first-century protest movements, viability of. That kind of thing. He’s in the middle of all this. But it doesn’t look like an op gone wrong or a money grab.”

  She takes her hand off the window; the ghosts of her touch, illumed by traces of starlight, fade.

  “Something about it is old.”

  Skinner thinks about Terrence, a man who’d been almost entirely gray the day they met, but elastic-skinned, clear-eyed. He gave always an impression of seniority, never age. Except at their last meeting, Cologne, the airport coffee bar. But even then he’d appeared tired more than old. Tired, that eternally spry and curious mind, tired.