The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Which is easier to believe?” Ellison asks the Signalman. “That this Nell Snow woman is a face-stealing ghoul-human hybrid, or that she’s only a sleeper agent constructed for . . . well, whatever it is Barbican Estate might find useful?”

  The Signalman waits until the thoroughly confused waitress is well out of earshot before answering. He unfolds two paper napkins and covers his lap. They’re new slacks, after all. “In more normal circumstances,” he says, “I could see how maybe that question would have a pretty obvious answer. But, unfortunately, as the fucking fates would have it, our particular theater of operations doesn’t usually afford obvious answers or clear-cut delineations between that which is impossible and that which is merely improbable. Which is to say, I don’t really I have an answer, only probabilities.” The Signalman sprinkles salt and pepper on his scrambled eggs, a dash of Tabasco, and then he spreads margarine over his blueberry pancakes. “Sure, a sleeper agent would be reasonable in a more conventional counterintelligence, deep-cover scenario, someone as invisible as invisible ever gets. A goddamn null set of a human being.” He pauses and looks at Ellison across his breakfast. “To paraphrase a wonderful Walter Matthau movie, double agents have to be drab and unremarkable people.”

  Ellison frowns and stares down at her own breakfast. The eggs are overcooked.

  “And Immacolata Sexton—and that Ptolema character,” she says. “We’re actually meant to believe they’re—”

  “Eat up, kiddo,” says the Signalman. “I’m tired of talking about Barbican’s freakshow. Your food’s getting cold. More to the point, my food’s getting cold.”

  —and just before you turn that Alice trick and step through the looking glass, you finally hear the hound snuffling about somewhere beyond the confines of the shimmering sphere, angry and cheated and trying to find a way through. So you haven’t been abandoned. You’ve only been locked up somewhere the troublesome laws of spacetime and quantum physics make it impossible for the beast to reach you. The sphere is the siren’s medicine for Tindalos, her prophylaxis against her doom. And now the hound does what it does that isn’t howling, a cry like entire planets grinding one against the other, and for just an instant, your head is clear again. For the first time since the siren took the shiny lure and showed up at the High Museum, joining you in front of the glass case and the hideous little artifact on display inside the case—just like the Signalman had said she would, just like all the DIRD data crunchers beneath the Erastus Corning Tower had predicted. The trap had been the Signalman’s idea, and it had worked like a fucking charm.

  The hound wails, and there is clarity.

  And within this clarity you close your eyes.

  The label in the display case claims the idol came from marine dredgings off the coast of Prince of Wales Island. That it turned up in 1937, during a canal expansion for a ferry, hauled up by the crew of the Sweet Leilani, a week before the ship sank into the frigid depths of Cross Sound. There were no survivors, says the label. This siren, the Welsh-born woman named Jehosheba, she takes your hand, and hers is wet and cold as ice. “Alms,” she says, “Alms for Mother Hydra. Alms for the Abyss.”

  The sharpshooters open fire. The hound wails.

  She squeezes your hand.

  And that should be that, between the hound and the guns, the two or three bullets that found their mark, the red mess spilling from Jehosheba’s gut—except that isn’t that. That isn’t that at all, and now is later and you’ve gone down to her god and walked her maze and with eyes closed you’re stepping through a mirror, out of one nightmare and straight into another. You’re helplessly, frantically wondering why no one’s stopping this, why no one is coming to your rescue, why no one has your back like the Signalman promised just the night before. The siren smiles and kindly takes her claws from your skull, either because she has what she wants or because it wasn’t ever there in the first place, and she whispers, “It’s almost over now, little killer.

  “It’s almost just begun.

  “Hush now.

  “You’ve no one to blame except yourself.

  “And him.”

  11.: Memo to Human Resources (Whistling in the Dark)

  (Dreamland, January 19, 2018)

  When God created black, this room must have been the reason why. Black was created because, one day, 13.8 billion years down the pike from the instant of the Big Bang, it would be needed for this room to exist. Mackenzie Regan opens her eyes, then shuts them, then opens them again. She’s sitting in a black chair at a black table. The walls are black and so are the floors. So is the ceiling, but she’s trying not to look directly at the ceiling. There’s something wrong with it, something awful. It seems to rotate counterclockwise, and she thinks of Dorothy caught inside the twister, flying away to Oz. Mackenzie looks at everything that isn’t the ceiling. She looks down at her thin, pallid hands, if only because they’re not black.

  She thinks, This is what an interrogation room would look like if whoever built it had only seen interrogation rooms in old cop shows and gangster movies.

  And if they could only use the color black.

  “Am I alive?” she asks, and the achromatic stick figure sitting across the table from her seems to waver for a moment, like heat shimmer rising off scalding asphalt. When it doesn’t answer, Mackenzie adds, “Did I die on the plane? Did we all die on the plane?”

  “We have a few questions for you,” the stick figure replies, and its sexless voice is as black as the room. Compared to the voice of the interrogator, that Siri bitch is just dripping with charisma and sunshine.

  “First, I want to know if I’m alive,” she says. Mackenzie Regan might be relatively new to the spy vs. spy scene, but she’s been around long enough to know that the agency has ways of making even the dead talk, should the need arise.

  The stick figure tilts its featureless stick-figure head to one side, and it crosses its long stick-figure arms. “Rest assured, we will come back to that, Agent Regan. But time is a factor. Time is of the essence. Time is the only thing we do not presently possess in abundance.”

  The walls and floor of the black room look like sheets of polished graphite. There are no windows. There’s no door. There’s no visible light source, and there’s nothing that Mackenzie would ever go so far as to call light, but somehow she can still see, can distinguish one perfectly black shape from another.

  No, not graphite, she thinks. Graphite isn’t this black. And then she remembers something called Vantablack, a man-made substance capable of absorbing 99.96% of all light that touches it. A honeycomb of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays, VANTA, that traps photons and holds them until they’re finally absorbed and dissipated as heat. At some point, she read a briefing on the potential weapon and camouflage applications of Vantablack, but when was that? Vantablack, trademarked by Surrey NanoSystems Limited, referenced in three patents—

  “It would be helpful, Agent Regan,” says the stick figure in its black voice, “if you would please try harder to focus. We need to talk now about what happened on the flight from Los Angeles to Quonset. Your mind is wandering. We need to talk now about what you saw, what you recall of what you may have experienced before the plane went down.”

  “So, we crashed?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

  “We need to talk now about the water in the plane.”

  And Mackenzie remembers the water then, and the terrible cold of the water, and the Signalman cursing while the cabin of the Beechcraft King Air flooded. At least the black room isn’t cold, even if it isn’t actually warm, either.

  “Yes,” says the stick figure. “The plane. The flood inside the plane.”

  Mackenzie stares back at her faceless inquisitor, and she thinks, If you can read my mind, why don’t you just take whatever it is you’re looking for and leave me alone?

  “We are bound by protocol,” it replies. “There are rules, regulations, restrictions.”

  “Is he dead, too?” Mackenzie asks. “Did we
both die up there?”

  “We’ll come to that, by and by,” says the stick figure. “But first there are other, more pressing matters. And time is a factor.”

  “Time is of the essence,” Mackenzie whispers to herself.

  “Very much so,” says the stick figure. “We have questions about Agent Nicodemo, and about the water, and about everything you saw up there. We need to know if you might be aware of Agent Nicodemo’s whereabouts, if you know what has become of her. She was still on the plane when it began to flood, yes?”

  “Where else would she have been?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” the stick figure answers unhelpfully.

  The blackness is beginning to make Mackenzie’s head ache, and she rubs her eyes.

  “Do we really have to do this here?” she asks the stick figure. “Isn’t there somewhere else? I think this place is beginning to make me ill.”

  “It will be over soon,” the stick figure assures her, “if you’ll only answer our questions. Even if you do not, it will be over soon, because we have so very little time.”

  I can see black light, and Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black, and All the pictures had all been washed in black, and–

  “You need now to focus, please, Agent Regan. Your mind is straying.”

  No, my mind is smothering.

  “Where was the water coming from?” the stick figure wants to know.

  “From everywhere,” Mackenzie tells it. “It was coming from everywhere all at once. I don’t know. It was like the air started bleeding water.” She stops rubbing her eyes and goes back to looking at her hands, pale as chalk or mascarpone, the veins like a roadmap traced in blue and violet ink. They look like a dead woman’s hands. Or like the hands of a woman deep in a coma, kept alive by machines and the men who keep the machines alive. Either way, the hands of a broken woman.

  “Are you saying that it was raining inside the airplane?” the stick figure asks.

  “No, it wasn’t like rain. It wasn’t at all like rain.”

  “How was it not?” asks the stick figure, and it leans back in its black seat, intently watching without eyes. “How was it not like rain?”

  “It wasn’t falling,” Mackenzie replies. “And it was saltwater. We were going over the report on the Gove situation again, and—”

  “And, at this point, where was Agent Nicodemo?”

  “In her seat,” says Mackenzie.

  “She wasn’t included in the discussion? Why is that?”

  For a moment, Mackenzie silently stares back at the stick figure and at all the blackness behind and around and above it, all that seething, light-devouring void, and she wonders, briefly, what would happen if she at least tried not to answer any more of its questions. Ellison Nicodemo might not be the very last thing she wants to talk about, but she isn’t far from it. And for the first time it occurs to Mackenzie Regan that it might not be Albany conducting this debriefing. For all she has any way of knowing, it might be someone from Barbican or, much worse yet, the Julia Set crowd.

  “Time is a factor,” the stick figure reminds her, crossing its arms again.

  “No,” says Mackenzie. “She wasn’t included in the discussion. She was so high I doubt she could have made it to the toilet on her own. That woman shouldn’t even have been on the plane,” she says. “I told him that, before we picked her up, that the three of us returning on the same flight was an unnecessary risk, but he wouldn’t hear it.”

  “So when the plane began to flood, she was still in her seat?”

  “Isn’t that what I just told you? Aren’t we in a hurry?”

  The stick figure sits up straight once more, and with a stick-figure arm it makes a motion like someone smoothing back their hair. It nods its featureless, round head. “Returning, then, to the water, please describe now, as briefly as possible, and without omitting any salient details, how events unfolded on the aircraft after it began to flood.”

  Mackenzie Regan glances up at the ugly gyre where the ceiling should be.

  “There were fish in the water,” she says. “Little silver fish, like minnows. I held one in my hand. There were lots of them. Hundreds, maybe.”

  When she looks back at the stick figure, there’s that heat shimmer again.

  All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

  Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side, which he never shows anybody.

  Darkness is your candle.

  Mackenzie shuts her eyes. Or she only imagines that she does, just as it may only be an illusion that she’s sitting at a black table in a black room, being interrogated by a black stick figure. She shuts her eyes and she tells a story about an airplane filling up with seawater high above the Utah desert. She keeps her eyes closed tight, and she remembers the tale aloud, because maybe when she’s done they’ll let her wake up or let her finish with dying; either way, surely she’ll be free of the terrible black place.

  She talks, and it all comes back in fits and starts, like stuttering frames of an impossibly absurd film she saw a long, long time ago.

  The cold water and the little silver fish.

  Smoke and sparks and screaming alarms.

  And the moment when Ellison Nicodemo disappeared. There one second, gone the next, like a cheap parlor trick.

  “You actually saw when she vanished?” asks the stick figure.

  “Yeah. I was looking right at her. The water was already knee deep and the plane was pitching forward. We were already losing altitude. She was trying to get her seatbelt fastened. That ought to be funny, don’t you think? It isn’t, but it ought to be.”

  The smell of ozone and electrical fires. The poisonous stink of jet fuel.

  “Seawater freezes at about twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit,” she says, because maybe the stick figure doesn’t know these things. Because maybe no one ever bothered to tell it. “At that height, the air outside the plane was, what, fifty below? When the emergency door opened, all that water pouring out into the sky and taking us along, it was like . . . did you see that video online of someone tossing a bowl of hot water into the air, the way it instantly crystallized and fell as snow? Well, that’s what I remember—falling through a snowstorm, falling in a blizzard. Ice on my hands and my face and clothes and . . .”

  Falling like a rock.

  All that ice, no way the chutes would have opened. Even with the automatic activation devices as backup, no way.

  Mackenzie opens her eyes again, because that’s the last of it. There’s nothing left to remember, nothing left to tell, and she finds that the stick figure is gone and she’s alone in the black place. And now there’s nothing left to do but wait.

  12.: Casey’s Last Ride (Cue Ennio Morricone)

  (West Hollywood, Whiskey A Go Go, January 16, 2018)

  The Signalman takes a sip of his J.T.S. Brown and swishes the bourbon around in his mouth for a moment or two before swallowing. He has a bad tooth that’s starting to go hot, and the alcohol dulls the pain a little. That rotten molar is just one more thing he keeps telling himself he’ll take care of and just one more thing he can’t ever seem to get around to dealing with. There’s a framed Johnny Cash poster on the wall, Johnny Cash showing the whole damn world his middle finger, and the Signalman raises his glass in a toast to the Man in Black, then takes another swig of bourbon. Mackenzie Regan is sitting across from him, the two of them sitting together and alone in the horseshoe booth upholstered in cherry-red Naugahyde. She ordered a vodka and cranberry, but she’s hardly touched it. Mackenzie’s not really one for drinking on the job. She’s not really one for drinking off it, either.

  It’s late on a Tuesday afternoon, and no one’s in the club but the two of them and a couple of the staff. A Thin Lizzy cover band is scheduled to go on at eight, and the Signalman keeps checking his silver pocket watch, like eight o’clock isn’t several long hours away from now. The Doors’ “Strange Days” is playing, and it’s almost enough to
make him go find whoever’s responsible and get them to play something else instead. Slip them a sawbuck to swap out Jim Morrison’s apocalyptic crooning for any song a little less grim and a lot less fucking apropos. His life is plenty weird enough without the universe supplying a soundtrack.

  “I wish you could have met her eight or nine years ago,” he says to Mackenzie, resigning himself to the Doors. The song will be over soon, anyway, and there are better ways to blow ten dollars. “She was good. Most times, she was better than good.”

  Mackenzie frowns and stirs at her drink with a pink swizzle stick, then glances up at the Signalman. “Well, be that as it may, as far as I can tell all she is now is a junkie and a burnout and a liability. Putting her back into play might be the worst move I’ve ever seen personnel make.”

  “Which just shows to go you haven’t been around very long,” says the Signalman. “That’s not to say I think she should be on the street, but there’s nothing left to be gained by belaboring the obvious. And whatever Ellison is now, it doesn’t negate who she was or what she did back then. You read her file.”

  “Mostly,” says Mackenzie. “The broad strokes. Enough to get the gist.”

  “Is that how we’re judging folks these days, by getting the gist?”

  Mackenzie doesn’t reply. She just stares into her neglected drink.

  “Anyway,” says the Signalman, “since you know the broad strokes, you know about that thing in Germany, back in aught nine, the job she did in Babelsberg?”

  “Babelsberg? Where’s Babelsberg?”

  The Signalman sighs and rubs his temples with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He wants a cigarette so badly that the craving is almost as painful as the occasional jolts from his bum tooth. He thinks again about ignoring the No Smoking signs and reaching for the pack of Camels in his jacket pocket. He’s got a badge, if anyone wants to complain, a badge that says he’s an NSA agent, even if he isn’t anything of the sort. No one at the NSA is going to be complaining, either, and what the fuck good is a phony gold shield if it can’t at least get him a smoke when he needs one.