The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Your authorisation has been withdrawn, sir,” said the guard, who, like all the guards, wore no name tag.

  “I’m sorry?”

  The guard consulted his pad and scanned Alex’s phone again. “Your authorisation has been withdrawn.”

  Alex thought about it. “Nah, that doesn’t make any sense.” He started to open the door. “Let me have a—”

  “Please remain in the vehicle, sir,” said the guard.

  Alex put one foot on the ground. “Don’t be—”

  The guard took a step back. “Please remain in the vehicle, sir.” His hand hovered over his belt, either near the pepper spray or the taser, it was hard to be sure. At least he wasn’t reaching for his pistol. Alex got back in the car and closed the door.

  “There’s got to be a mistake,” he said through the open window. “It was working fine yesterday.”

  The guard scanned the phone again.

  “And there’s no need to shoot me.”

  The guard gave him a hard look, then held up the pad so he could see the screen. The word UNAUTHORIZED was displayed prominently in red letters.

  Alex sighed. “Call Professor Delahaye. He’ll sort this out. It’ll just be a glitch somewhere.”

  “It says your authorisation was withdrawn at Professor Delahaye’s request, sir,” the guard told him.

  Alex squinted at the screen, saw a tiny four-digit serial number under the much larger UNAUTHORIZED. “You utter bastard,” he muttered under his breath.

  “I have to ask you to leave, sir,” said the guard. “Please vacate the area.”

  It occurred to Alex to make a Thing about this, but life was too short to be spent annoying armed humourless men, so he started the car up, reversed back onto the road, and drove into town.

  IT TURNED OUT that the phone not only no longer worked to let him into the Facility, it no longer even worked as a phone. Its contact book and call logs were blank, and he couldn’t raise a dialling tone. He sat in the Telegraph with a cup of coffee and a doughnut and poked at the phone. He tried turning it off and back on again. He took the battery out and replaced it. Nothing.

  “You look like a man with a problem,” said Dru Winslow, sliding into the seat opposite.

  “Quite possibly,” he said.

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “Probably not.” He put the phone down beside his plate. “But thanks for offering. How’ve you been?”

  “Me? Fine.” She ordered a coffee and a chicken salad.

  “Actually, I’m glad I’ve seen you. I’ve been meaning to pop in.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Did you ever know the Shanahans? The people who used to live in my house?”

  Dru shook her head. “I don’t get over to East Walden much. No reason to go there. Unless you live there. Something wrong?”

  “Don’t know.” He looked around the diner. The lunch crowd had been and gone and the place was nearly empty. “When I first came here last year, Ralph Ortiz and Chief Rosewater said something about a prowler.”

  She snorted. “You mean the angel.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Dru settled herself in her seat and clasped her hands on the tabletop in front of her. “For a few weeks towards the end of last summer, we had a bunch of sightings of an unidentified guy hanging round town. Didn’t seem to be doing any harm, just wandering across people’s property, standing in their backyards, not really doing much of anything. We all figured it was some drifter, lost his job and his home and his family somewhere and he was just looking for a place to rest for a spell.”

  The people of Sioux Crossing sounded very understanding. “I sort of lost track of the story,” he said. “Did they ever catch him?”

  She shook her head. “Nah. Nobody even managed to get a good look at him apart from Walt Brooker.” She saw the look on his face. “No, you can’t speak with him. Walt passed just after Christmas.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Dru shrugged. “I didn’t know him that well. He wasn’t local. His dad was some kind of small-time preacher, had himself one of those cable television channels back in the nineties.” She looked off into the distance. “In Macon, if I remember rightly. Anyway, there was some kind of scandal and his dad went to jail and Walt and his mom made a run for it and wound up here. She was…” She looked into the distance again. “Jessica must have been, wow, she must have been in her nineties when they arrived. Walt was sixty-something. Bought a place south of town, didn’t mix much. Wanted to keep their heads down, I guess. Jessica died a couple of years later and then it was just Walter on his own. Didn’t even have a dog.”

  “And he died after he saw the prowler.”

  She looked at him for a moment. “It wasn’t that that killed him; he died months later. Walt weighed more than three hundred pounds; he had a massive heart attack. Died on the toilet.”

  “Oh.”

  Rhoda delivered Dru’s salad and coffee and went back to the counter. Dru unwrapped her knife and fork from their napkin. “So where was I? Oh, yeah. Right. Anyway, Walt was the only person who ever got a good look at the prowler. Everyone else saw them from a distance, but Walt said they were in his house.”

  Alex thought about a massively obese senior citizen suddenly finding a stranger in their home and wondered if it hadn’t, in fact, had something to do with Walt Booker’s death after all, but he kept his mouth shut and let Dru tell the story.

  “I went out there and interviewed Walt for the Banner a couple of days after it happened,” she said. “I could describe what shape the house was in, but I won’t, although I will mention that Walt’s personal hygiene was on the poor side. He said he’d been to his kitchen for something and when he went back into the living room there was someone just standing there in the middle of the floor.”

  “That must have been quite a shock.”

  “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” She put a spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred slowly. “But Walt was happy.” She thought about it. “No, actually, he looked radiant. He was just a big harmless kid, really, maybe not all that smart. I guess his folks never really let him grow up. But he was… beatific.” She raised her eyebrows and tried her coffee. “I couldn’t figure it out, so I asked him. ‘Most people would have been scared witless if they found an intruder in their living room,’ I said. And he just beamed at me and said, ‘That weren’t no intruder, Miss Drusilla. It was an angel.’” She nodded and sipped some more coffee.

  Alex thought about it. “Okay,” he said.

  “I thought about that a lot, after he passed,” she said. “Walt told his neighbour that his dad once felt the Voice of the Lord move through him. But Walt went to his reward believing he’d actually met an angel in his living room.”

  Alex picked up his doughnut and tore off a piece. “Did he happen to mention,” he said casually, “static?”

  Dru tipped her head to one side and gave him a look of such calmly intense interest that it was quite scary.

  “Pam Shanahan says she saw an intruder in her kitchen. My kitchen.” He popped the bit of doughnut into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “She didn’t think it was an angel, but she did say there was static.”

  Dru sat back. “Well… shit,” she said.

  “That was the reason they left in such a hurry,” he said. “Conventional wisdom is that she was off her face on painkillers or something at the time.”

  Dru shook her head. “Walt never touched a harmful substance in his life. Unless you count Twinkies.” She sat forward again. “He said everything in his living room was ‘sparky’. I thought he meant the Holy Spirit or something. I didn’t think he meant literally sparky.”

  “I’ve had a couple of sparky moments myself, since I got here.” He looked at the phone. Either it was dead or it wasn’t, and if it wasn’t it was probably relaying every word of this conversation, and he was fast approaching the point where he didn’t care any more.

  “Where’s Pam no
w?”

  “Her husband’s dying, Dru.” He realised they were speaking very quietly by now. “She wouldn’t thank you for going up there.”

  “You think this is something to do with the SCS.”

  “I don’t see how it can be. Colliders don’t do that. It’s not a black hole machine. And besides, it was out of action most of last year; they couldn’t get the magnets working properly.”

  “But you think something’s going on.”

  “I think maybe someone’s not been telling me all the bits of the story,” he said. He picked up the phone. “Unfortunately, I seem to have been fired.”

  “IT’S DELAHAYE,” SAID Wendy. “He’s really pissed with you.”

  “That’s hardly news,” said Alex. They were sitting at the island in his kitchen, eating omelettes. He’d never bothered to memorise any of the numbers on the phone—who did, any more? They were all on the phone to start with—so he’d had to use Ralph’s phone to call her. She’d made the old man put her number on his speed-dial list in case there was an emergency when Alex wasn’t about.

  “He’s read your book.”

  “No he hasn’t. Nobody’s read it yet.”

  “I’ve read it too,” she said, popping a forkfull of omelette in her mouth. “We all have.”

  He stared at her.

  “It turned up in our inboxes this morning,” she told him. “Not a book; more a quarter of a book and about a quarter of a million words of notes.”

  He felt a cold sensation in his chest. “Could I see, please?”

  “Sure.” She reached down into her bag, took out her pad, poked at its screen for a few seconds, then handed it over, and he found himself reading his own notes, the ones that were supposed to be safe and secure on his laptop.

  “Bollocks,” he said.

  “I tried to call you when it happened,” she said, “but your phone wasn’t working. I didn’t realise Delahaye had done that, the vindictive little shit. Why aren’t I in there?”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “You’ve got notes about Delahaye and Clayton and Larry and Bud and about two thirds of the staff, but nothing about me.” She pouted theatrically. “That kind of thing can hurt a girl, you know?”

  “It’s not funny,” he said again.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Is a bit.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but there was a knock at the door. “Excuse me a second.”

  Mickey Olive was standing out on the porch, a wry look on his face. “Oh god,” said Alex. “Not you too.”

  “Afraid so, old son,” said Mickey. “Could you pack an overnight bag and come with me? Stan wants a word.”

  Alex looked past Mickey’s shoulder. Another of the seemingly limitless fleet of brand new silver-grey SUVs was sitting at the bottom of his drive. Glancing to his right, he saw Ralph’s curtains twitch in a way which had not been caused by a stray breeze. “Fine,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Mickey said amiably.

  Back in the kitchen, Wendy raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been summoned to the Mother Ship,” Alex said.

  Wendy’s eyes widened. “Jesus,” she said. “You think Clayton was in on the mass-mailing?”

  “Oh, I’d put money on it.” Not that he was going to have money for much longer. He gave her the keys to the house. “Can you lock up after I’ve gone?”

  “Sure.”

  “And look in on Ralph while you’re here,” he said, heading for the stairs. “Leave the keys with him. I should be back tomorrow, but if I’m not I’ll try to let you know.”

  “Right.” She thought a moment, then called down the hallway, “Hey, do you want me to come with you?”

  “No,” he called back. “I’ve been bawled out by editors before. I’ll be fine.”

  HE’D EXPECTED SAN Francisco, but what he got was Chicago, a fast two-hour flight in the corporate jet, barely time for sandwiches and coffee. Mickey made small talk for a while, then lost interest and sat staring out of the window as the Midwest passed by far below.

  Lin was waiting for them at O’Hare, drove them downtown to the Four Seasons. Alex had an impression of an impossibly tall monolith of creamy grey stone, then he was being ushered inside gently but efficiently by Mickey.

  The penthouse was an extraordinary space, complete with a grand staircase that looked as if it belonged in a theatre rather than someone’s flat. The view out over the city and the lake was the kind of thing a person could become physically addicted to.

  “So,” said Stan. “I read your book.”

  “You weren’t supposed to see it yet,” Alex said. “It’s not finished. Someone hacked my laptop.”

  Stan pouted. Today he was dressed to kill. Suit worth almost as much as Alex’s old flat, crisp white shirt, Harvard tie, diamond tiepin, Oxfords buffed to a high shine. The costume of a man who was visiting old money or a firm of attorneys which had once represented Theodore Roosevelt. He said, “I think it’s pretty good, actually.”

  “You do?”

  “For something that isn’t finished yet, yes. I am a little disappointed with that, but you work at your own pace, I guess.” He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “But you nailed the sensawunda, and that makes me happy.”

  “I haven’t made Delahaye happy. He withdrew all my access.”

  Stan guffawed. “I don’t blame him. Why did you have to actually write down those things about him?”

  “They’re only notes. Just to nudge my memory.”

  Stan subsided. “Yeah. Yeah, I had him on the phone this morning, about fifteen minutes after your stuff hit the intranet—and it was only the project intranet, which was fortunate, otherwise pirate sites in Uzbekistan would be selling ebook copies of your notes right now. Paul wants you off the project. Says he’ll walk if I don’t fire you.”

  Alex found himself grinding his teeth.

  “So,” Stan said. “If I fire you I’ll lose what’s shaping up to be exactly what I want. And if I don’t, I’ll lose Paul, who in spite of—or possibly even because of—being an Olympic-level asshole, is actually very very good at his job and will be hard to replace. What would you do?”

  “I quit,” said Alex.

  Stan’s face fell. “Aw, don’t be like that. What about the book?”

  “You’ve got my notes. Get someone else to finish it.”

  Stan looked at him for a long time without speaking. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to fire you, which will satisfy Paul, and then I’m going to retain you on a freelance basis, same terms as before, so you can finish the book. Where you choose to do that is entirely up to you. You could stay in the house, you could go back to Boston. Hell, you could even go home to Scotland. I won’t restore your access to the Facility, but what I can do is issue you a phone with a sockpuppet ID, on condition that you use it very very sparingly.”

  “That’ll never work. Someone will tell Delahaye.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to work out the nuts and bolts. As far as Paul’s concerned, you’re just sitting in your house finishing the book. How about it?”

  It occurred to Alex to demand that the listening devices be removed from the house, but it was pointless. He’d only ever have Stan’s word that they were all gone. He said, “Delahaye’s never going to go for this.”

  “Yes, but you have to keep three things in mind about Paul. One, he wants you off-site. Two, he wants you punished for the things you said about him. And three, he’s never going to get another job like this anywhere else. It’s not ideal, but you get to finish the book and Paul gets to think he’s fucked you over.” He smiled. “Come on, Alex. The restaurant in this place is outstanding. Let’s wrap this up and we can go and eat.”

  Alex thought about it. “Well,” he said.

  “So,” Stan said crisply. “The next thing is, I’d like to find out who hacked your laptop and leaked the book.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”
<
br />   “This is a tech company, Alex,” Stan reminded him. “I have people who are very good at that sort of thing.”

  Alex shook his head. “Nobody touches that laptop but me. I’ll sort it out.”

  “Okay. But if you need support, you’ll let me know.”

  “If I do.”

  “If you do.” Stan sat forward. “So, do we have a deal?”

  “There may be other stuff I’ll need, further on down the road.”

  “Anything you want. Within reason.”

  “Not good enough, if you’re deciding what’s within reason or not.”

  Stan looked at him. “Okay, Alex. Just don’t ask me to sign the company over to you.”

  “All right.”

  Stan grinned and put his hand out. “You’re fired,” he said. “Welcome to the family.”

  And as if by magic, Mickey appeared from one of the many other rooms in the apartment, bearing another thousand-page contract.

  THE OBVIOUS SUSPECT for hacking his laptop was Delahaye. He was desperate to see what Alex had written about him, which gave him motive, and Alex used his laptop a lot at the SCS, sitting in the commissary transcribing notes or fighting a losing battle against spam emails, which gave him opportunity. He had a bunch of sycophants at the Facility, and it wouldn’t have taken much to get one of his flying monkeys to do the deed for him.

  But.

  “There’s someone new at the Facility,” Alex said. “I’ve seen him a couple of times, from a distance, so he’s not just visiting for the day.” There were always new faces at the SCS, people dropping in for a few days to help out on some project or another.

  “Did you get a good enough look to describe him?” Kitson asked.

  Alex looked around his backyard, located an old log near the edge of the woods, and went over to sit down. “Indian or Pakistani, mid fifties, greying hair, little goatee beard,” he said. “About your height but a couple of stone heavier. Very nattily dressed. Grey pinstripe suit.”