by Jillian Boyd
Chime’s stomach fell past her shoes, down to the depths of the ancient brick-lined sewers. She didn’t speak as she packed her bags and the man escorted her to a waiting town car in the roundabout of the hotel’s grand entrance. Control was already waiting in the back seat, adjusting her short silver hair in the driver’s rearview mirror. When the Company man took Chime’s bag and opened the door, for a moment she felt like running, but Control patted the seat beside her.
There was nothing to do.
“Did Operator,” Chime began as she climbed in, although she didn’t know how to ask what she was asking.
Control shook her head. “Don’t.”
Chime nodded.
As the car began to drive, Control sighed. “It’s important that you realize that no one is blaming you, per se. But details are important. Self-control is important.” With practiced precision, Control patted Chime on the shoulder. “Maybe take up knitting or some other craft. Do something else with your hands.”
Chime’s face burned. She held in her tears until their pressure forced her under and into sleep.
When she woke up, the sun was rising, Control was gone, and the car was pulling in to a new hotel.
***
Since then, Chime sat in her rotation of towers, still shuttled around the side doors of the finest cities in the continent but cut off from the world. Her interactions with other agents minimized by Control, Chime was relegated to receiving one-way radio frequency transmissions from bugs secreted across The Moon. She observed, she reported. The words came across the wire, she typed them on the cryptograph and left them outside the door to vanish by the morning. Chime hung there between work-imposed isolation and a self-imposed exile, accepting her fate and her shame.
Sometimes, Chime wondered if she deserved it. She wondered what happened to Operator, whether The Company got to him or if it was some rival agency. She didn’t know which would be worse.
Late at night, as she sat in the glow of the oscilloscope, watching it tremble and sway in the secondhand background noise of traffic or the sleeping coughs of the unaware targets, Chime would wonder if it was Operator’s fault or her own. Did she lead him too far along in her desire for connection, sending out coded signals that drove him rogue? Or did he break under other pressures, but she was too weak to maintain control? She didn’t know which would be worse.
For the first year in exile, she was assigned to minimum priority targets. Bruised, low hanging fruits with brutish speech patterns and terrible diction. She took their voices in, their dirty words and petty crimes coating her in the filth of the bottom rung. Observe, report, listen, draft. Chime was their receptacle, locked away in the faceless rooms and cubicles, watching huge flecks of dirt and scabs floating through the broken shafts of light. With every harsh word, the coarse tongues and phlegmatic warbles of her rogues gallery nipped and licked her. But she bore it like a penance for her role in Operator’s disconnect.
Chime made a point of embracing her isolated monitoring, devoting herself to her cloistered existence. Positively monastic in the depths of her cells, she rolled in the broken glass of the accents, taking them deep into her and processing them. Information bled from her onto the pages that she pecked away at on the cryptograph’s metal bones. Chime the echo became Chime the invisible, a perfect conduit.
Until she heard the voice.
She wasn’t sure at first. It was in a crowded noisescape, the transmitter perhaps in a sawdust-floored barroom or a crowded public house. The men - all she ever heard was men - were talking in Greek and Armenian, although not to each other. Alone in her room but surrounded by their hot breath, she picked through the glottal stops and the grunts, prying through for scraps left by The Drake. The Drake was a whisper in The Company, a ghost in a continent full of empty graves. No one ever talked about him, but everyone talked about what he’d done.
Useless, Chime wrinkled her nose, shaking her head as if to push her ears deeper into the morass. Something, something, anything familiar. A place, a name - a voice?
It was Greek and at first it slid past her ears, almost too slick to feel. But it left a tingle, a burning line like a finger of fire tracing from behind her ear, down the side of her neck, into the dip between her collarbones. Chime trembled. That something so foreign and alien should have this effect, for a moment her mind and her body rebelled and pulled apart. Then she heard him, that voice, laugh. Anyone else would have missed it, but something hidden in that voice sank its claws deep between her shoulder and neck, a muscle-level sweetness shaking her.
Then a door closed and the voice was gone. Chime shivered in the vacuum, alone in the crowded sounds.
“Possible high value target,” she wrote in her report. “Left at 8:57 p.m. Recommend follow-up.”
In the year of her debasement, someone, somewhere up The Ladder, had begun to value the quality and thoroughness of her reports. Monitoring details were reassigned on her suspicion.
There were false starts and dead ends, to be sure, but whisper by whisper, she began to hear him everywhere. He haunted her in other broadcasts from other places: a mobile transmitter from the Roma market by the train station; the parabolic microphone in the Four Seasons’ lobby; the thirty seconds of audio in the alternating channels from the Monte Carlo casino floor. Every day when she sat down at the desk, turned on the receiver and flipped the switch that woke up the hungry heartbeat of the oscilloscope, parts of her were aching. She needed to hear him.
Each time his voice was different, but buried in it was the same deep thrilling wire. Warming and opening, her pores began to sweat when she heard him across a crowded room. She could listen to him for hours, coming out of it at the end with her skin tingling and in a dopamine daze. In a fog, her fingers danced across the cryptograph’s keys and the next day, Chime was whisked away to follow. At night, when she lay in bed alone, she was sickened by the alien sound of her own breathing. She wanted so badly to hear him. Listening was safe.
In one port of call, she entered her new room with her old travel bag and found a manila envelope with a handwritten message. “Drake confirmed thx to yr work. Dossier and photo enclosed. Transfer request? -CNTRL”
Chime held the weight of the paper in her hands, the pages of the future threatening to spill out across the floor. She could see him. She could know him. She could leave him.
It was so heavy.
Then Chime gripped it and began to tear it. She tore it into pieces for pieces for pieces.
“I’m not done yet.” The walls and their ears for ears for ears were silent, but she wasn’t asked again.
Instead, Chime’s world coalesced around him, building into a pearl of persistent observation. It was the game they played. He would hide, covering himself in dialects and slangs and codes. Then on the count of ten, Chime would turn on the radio and try to find him. She ran through the voices and sounds of the world she was no longer a part of, spinning into a dizzy whirl until she fell over laughing.
Cat and mouse, Chime and Drake. Closer and closer, she drew a tighter and tighter circle around him.
“I found you,” she whispered to herself.
She always did. Until she didn’t.
***
All of which brings Chime back to the present, to the dead speakers and the flat oscilloscope. The radio has been silent for days, not even static. She knows that The Drake is here in the city - she heard him making plans in Vienna - she even knows the hotel and the suite. But the observation team hasn’t yet put things into place, so Chime is stuck here, a lonely voice ringing in the empty head of her rented room. She wants to scream or break something, but she can always feel The Company’s eyes for eyes for eyes.
Chime is rocking back and forth in her chair when the steady rhythm of quiet creaks is broken by a knock at the door. Chime freezes. She was once trained for this, but for the life of
her can’t remember what to do next. Creeping to the door, she peers through the peephole.
A small silver head. Control.
Chime opens the door.
“Hello,” Control says.
“Hello.” English sounds strange to Chime. American English doubly so.
“I suppose you’ve noticed that there are no transmissions. That’s because the interception team has been detained.”
For a moment, Chime racks her mind for the proper codex to decipher what Control is saying. She rolls the wheels of her internal Enigma Machine before it occurs to her that Control is not speaking in riddles.
“Then how will we hear him?”
“We can’t.”
“But we know where he is.” Chime is louder than she has any need to be, but if Control notices, the older woman is implacable.
“We do,” Control nods. “But we have no eyes or ears in there. It’s a black box.”
Control tells Chime all about it. The mission failure in St. Petersburg, the border patrol and investigation. Things moving around deep beneath them, reverberations shaking upwards until they cause lights to go out and The Moon to go dark. Now here, steps away from The Drake in his den, Control and Chime are the only Company operatives in the city. No eyes for eyes for eyes, no ears for ears for ears.
No one to do the simple task of breaking into The Drake’s hotel room and planting a bug.
“I’ll do it,” says Chime. She is flushed and already steaming, she can barely keep from yelling over old Control’s gleaming metal hair. Control simply smiles.
“It’s important that you realize that no one would blame you.” Control pats her on the shoulder, time having done nothing to make her stiff motions more passably human.
Chime nods. “But self-control is important.”
“Indeed.”
After Control leaves her with the listening devices, Chime dresses to go out in a pencil skirt, a loose blouse, no gun. She thinks of adding jewelry but decides against it, the jangle of bracelets being counter-productive for stealth and a necklace offering yet another chokehold in close quarters. As for her hair, she ties it back in a tight bun so as not to leave too many strands that might give away her passage. A smear of makeup to start, but as she falls back into remembered practices she slows down. As her mother used to say, doing something halfway is worse than not doing it all.
She looks at herself in the multiple bathroom mirrors and even under the harsh fluorescent lighting, Chime nods in approval. Chimes for Chimes for Chimes all nod back in the reflective parallax. She feels ready.
The streets are crowded in the late afternoon but Chime is pulled onward through the vibrant throngs toward The Drake’s hotel. Past the sidewalk cafes that she used to dream of sitting in, doing her spying over a cafe au lait and a copy of French Vogue, which here is just Vogue, she feels the emptiness dragging her forward. There’s no clear reason why, but all Chime knows is that she has to do this.
At the hotel, bellhops in blue suits and white gloves open the doors for her with a “Bonjour, mademoiselle.” Chime manages to eke out a “Merci,” realizing just now how thoroughly her once deft tools of language and tongue have rusted.
So she stops a brief moment and touches one bellhop on the arm. “Ou est la reception?” It’s small, but she feels the flakes of disuse falling away.
At the front desk, she chats with the thin, bored woman who gives her an envelope held under the name Talisker. As practice, Chime laces her French with an underlying brogue, a touch that the receptionist does not seem to notice, but delights Chime to no end.
Inside the envelope is a cloned key card to The Drake’s room in the Guildenstern Wing. It strikes Chime as odd that The Company can have a contact to make the keys, but not use them. This, however, is The Company’s standard procedure - even in the dark there are hands for hands for hands. Regardless, she takes the elevator to the 19th floor and heads for the suite.
The Drake is out, according to the secondary wave of local turncoats and spotters, allowing Chime more than enough time to enter, plant the transmitters and exit. Until then, The Drake’s hotel room could be the one place in the city where The Company is completely blind and deaf. Except for Chime, there is no one to see what happens. Her heart races, but the involuntary tremor and gooseflesh draw a smile.
After knocking lightly and receiving no answer, Chime opens the door with the card. This is dead space, she thinks as she enters the room. Something different - the psychosomatic stillness in the absence of the transmitters’ buzz, the knowledge that hers are the only ears and eyes in the room. It’s like being in outer space or at the bottom of the sea, the vacuous calm and the strange distance of it all.
Chime quickly gets to work. A bug here behind the neo-cubist painting, one in the back of the striped love seat, another by the demi-foyer for good measure. Chime was trained for this and she completes her task in a moment, but she isn’t done. Not yet. There’s a narcotic slowness to being in his secondhand presence that makes her sleepwalk around the room, taking it in. In the past, she’d torn up a picture and sheet of his vitals rather than ruin the abstracted pale fire of his voice, but now, confronted by the reality, her head swims and sings like a drunken mermaid.
Then she hears the laughter in the hall.
At first it’s just a woman and Chime freezes, listening to it ring closer and closer. It’s too much, trying too hard to send out coded signals, the guffaws in Morse code. But then Chime hears another laugh and her ears begin to burn. It’s him.
By the time the key card is in the slot and the mechanical lock has protested into place, the room is empty. Or at least that’s how it appears to The Drake and the maiden who enter. From inside the bedroom closet, pressed against the clinging bags of dry-cleaned suits and the never-used hotel ironing board, Chime listens to them laugh and talk.
“You are not,” the woman says. Her English fights its way through a thick Algerian base.
“Swear to god,” he says. He’s trying to sound Australian and Chime cringes at the denim jacket of an accent, but still trembles with a hidden ecstasy. “I’m a professional shark fisher.”
“You are not,” the woman says. Then The Drake growls and the woman shrieks and laughs, the exaggerated scamper of her footsteps reeling into the bedroom.
Chime holds her breath, now mere feet from the man she’s chased across The Moon. The Drake is facing the closet, facing Chime, but the woman between them blocks his appearance. All Chime can see is the corona of his hair and his ears on the other side of the black hole of his companion. Even now, his image is redacted as his hands dig through the woman’s long dark hair, run down her skin, tease around the edges of her sleeves and her neckline. From between the slats, Chime can only see pieces, the lines and signs suggesting the swelling urgency behind his movements.
But she can hear them. The sounds they make as their lips press and pull at one another. Beneath it, the heavy panting and the whisper zip of his jacket as he sheds it like a skin, sloughing it off to the floor.
“No,” she says into his mouth. Even from here, Chime can hear and feel the soft breaths. “Really?”
The whisper of another zipper, one that Chime can’t see, but from the way it keeps going and going, the way the woman gasps, Chime imagines the side of her dress slowly opening. As she moves her vantage point, Chime sees the long expanse of the woman’s soft skin as the garment falls away.
“I’m a spy,” he says, deep and low, the dungaree accent gone, the naked flame revealed.
Chime knows it’s true.
In her closet, Chime is growing hotter and hotter. Tilting her head this way and that, straining to see through the slats, the segmented image moves past her eyes like a zoetrope. The Drake’s hands slide along the woman’s ample hips, pulling away her undergarments. Pale hands glide across darker skin, s
queezing, pressing, pulling. Chime breathes in short bursts, staccato raps that flicker in and out like the images. The rapid shifts are disorienting, making her eyes roll and her teeth clench.
Chime closes her eyes. Without thinking, she brushes her fingers across her lips.
The old familiar caress, the motion that was her way of imaging Operator’s distant touch, sets off a series of chain reactions. Suddenly every part of Chime’s body cries out for attention. A trail of itching desire runs down her chin, over the soft bones of her neck, between her breasts. Lower. The hair on her head stands at attention as her scalp pinches tight, the repercussions traveling in waves through her bones and into her pelvis. It’s been over a year, she realizes, since she felt this alert.
The heavy breathing, the soft half-moans of pleasure from the couple outside of Chime’s door are a cloud of sound. Eyes closed, no longer distracted by the broken beams of erotic imagery, she can hear it and feel it all. The world opens up to Chime and the waves and echoes paint the world for her from every angle.
“You’re a spy,” the woman says, her words drawn around a smile. “Then I can make you talk.”
Chime hears the shift of the woman’s weight as she kneels on the carpet and The Drake’s surprised gasp with the first smooth sound of her tongue sliding along the shaft. Maybe, Chime thinks, she can hear it as he grows beneath the wet sounds. More unaffected gasps in between the furrowed rasps of long fingernails dragging down his thighs. Unrelenting suction, rocking back and forth, the woman’s sharp exhale through her nose.
Chime remembers the night that Operator called. She remembers the sensations and her longing, the way she wanted to call out. But she was too scared then to embrace it all. And when she tried, Control put her in her place. Chime’s moment of weakness opened her up to The Company’s ears for ears for ears and stripped her bare, broke her down.
But that was then, in the safe prison of her hotel rooms and offices. This room is the black box. There are no eyes for eyes for eyes. Just Chime and The Drake and the woman. And now that Chime has closed her eyes, it’s just her.
