Skinner

by Charlie Huston

  “It was a SCADA thing. Infrastructure attack. Kinetic. Out of Ukraine. Supposed to start a cascade of the eastern grid. We think. But all they got was blackouts in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Very small in the news cycle. But a two-hundred-megawatt generator blew. SCADA. The Iranian computer worm. The one the Iranians were bitching about. Went after their nuclear plant. Stuxnet worm. Looks like that. But different. Fooled a lube oil pump into shutting down. Took seconds for the turbine to grind itself out of commission. Some attributable deaths. Car accident when the traffic lights went black in Scranton. Guy fell down some stairs, broke his neck. Five dead that we know about.”

  Terrence clicks the button at the end of his pen. He likes the weight of it. Heft. He bought it in Stockholm a few weeks ago. Waiting for someone in a stationery store. He clicks it three times.

  “Ukraine?”

  Cross lifts his hand from his desk and sets it back down.

  “That is what it looks like.”

  Terrence doodles the number five in the margin of his notebook page.

  “Who else is working on it?”

  Haven grins, scratches the back of his neck, shakes his head.

  “Who.”

  Cross presses a fingertip between his eyes.

  “Terrence, really. Everyone. Everyone is working on it.”

  Of course they are. Cyber attack. Every security contractor and agency, the military, commercial anti-virus software makers, everyone. They’ll all be trying to find out who launched a cyber attack on America’s power grid and caused the deaths of at least five people.

  That’s the point, isn’t it?

  Terrence scratches out the doodled number five.

  “I was just thinking aloud. Yes, everyone. Kestrel. Hann-Aoki, Triple Canopy, XO, Symantec, NSA, CIA, DynCorp, Aegis, air force, army, Homeland.”

  He looks at Cross.

  “Does anyone have an inside track?”

  Cross’s fingers rattle his keyboard.

  “That’s what we’re all jostling for.”

  A printer across the room wakes, hums, buzzes in short bursts, smoothly spilling paper into a tray.

  Cross points at the printer.

  “A contract.”

  A last sheet of paper shushes into place, the printer goes silent.

  “Freelance. Three months guaranteed, with an employer option to extend for another year.”

  Terrence walks to the printer, looks down at the top sheet of the stack.

  “A temp contract with the company I founded. Shall I comment on the irony?”

  Cross plucks a pen from the holder on his desk.

  “History, Terrence. Some lingering bile to get off your mind. Is this the time for that? Now, while our country is under attack?”

  Terrence pulls the top sheet of paper from the printer, looks at some of the numbers.

  “Well, it has been some time since I had your balls in my hand. No telling when I might get a chance to twist them again. If not now, when?”

  Cross aims his pen at Terrence, a dart looking for a target.

  “You recruited me, if I recall correctly, because you wanted someone with a robust appetite for the jugular. Your other misjudgments aside, you got what you wanted.”

  Terrence looks around the office, nods.

  “And so did you.”

  Cross points at the paper in Terrence’s hand.

  “Want to come out of pasture? You have the ticket right there.”

  Terrence looks at the contract in his hand. The logo at the head of the page. An American kestrel, the slight sparrow hawk of the falcon family, lean and swift, adaptable, stooping to its prey. A logo he designed while still working at the CIA. An embodiment of his dream for post–cold war intelligence. And, yes, that had been a lean time at Langley, but never swift or adaptable. He’d been right enough, leaving when he did, taking his legendary eye for talent into the private sector. Cut loose from the worst of the bureaucracy, he’d been free to cultivate freelancers who never would have been tolerated inside The Company. Some tremendous successes. And also Cross. A brilliantly conscienceless Beltway climber with a clear-eyed view of national security unclouded by sentiment. The perfect man to mind the details while Terrence theorized, projected, handled esoteric ops, hunted talent, and gradually, willingly, ceded authority to the young man who would sit on the couch in his office, honing his mind against the grinding wheel of Terrence’s relentlessly merciless vision of the future.

  Until the several follies of the Montmartre Incident made it possible for Cross to get up off the couch and bring in his evil mastermind desk.

  They will know if you lie.

  He looks up.

  “Who do you want?”

  Cross tips his head, acknowledging, it seems, Terrence’s submission to the circumstances.

  “I want Jae.”

  Terrence looks into his notebook’s open pages.

  “She won’t work for you.”

  “No. But she’ll work for you. Why else would you be here, Terrence, if not for that fact?”

  Haven stretches his legs, crosses his ankles, folds his arms over his chest.

  “That fact.”

  Terrence looks at Haven, meeting, for the first time since coming into the room, his desert-scarred eyes.

  Haven blinks, deliberate closure, open.

  “Late in the day, old man, for recrimination.”

  Terrence does not blink.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Haven raises a hand from the couch, drops it.

  “My mistake. I thought there was a general excavation going on. Dig up the old bones and chew them.”

  Terrence looks back at Cross.

  “Jae won’t work for you. And she won’t work with him. Pick another name.”

  Cross shakes his head.

  “There are no other names. Let’s not play, you don’t have anyone else in your armory. They all stayed with Kestrel. You have Jae. Which is the point, don’t you see? Terrence. Don’t you see? Must I. Spell it out?”

  Terrence doesn’t move.

  Cross raises and drops his shoulders.

  “I must. You have Jae. She is all you have. How long would you have her if she knew you were the one who assigned Haven to Iraq?”

  Terrence is remembering the first annual Conference for Securing 21st-Century Security. Year 2000. His first sight of Cross. Front row of a panel titled National Security and Climate Change, in which Terrence, overtired from an afternoon spent trolling the hospitality suites for contracts to keep Kestrel alive as it incubated, raised his voice over a modulated debate regarding the virtues of switch grass as a fossil fuel replacement: We all know the final solution, and I’m using those words entirely conscious of what they imply—we all know that the final solution to global fucking climate change is going to be a radical reduction in global fucking population. The hush that followed, the heads turned away, suggested that Terrence had rather embarrassingly just vomited into his own lap but that everyone would be pleased to ignore the fact if he would quietly leave and go clean himself up in the bathroom. He did, in fact, remove himself to the john, where Cross found him splashing cold water on the back of his neck and asked if he could buy him a drink. Three vodka tonics later Terrence had offered him a job, never so lucky before or since to have such a talent fall into his lap.

  Haven had been there. One of the believers who had followed Terrence out of government service. His own opinion of Cross characteristically laconic. That guy. He’s got something on his mind, old man.

  Now they all have something on their mind. The past.

  Terrence takes a step sideways.

  “What do you have for her?”

  Cross pushes his empty hands across the desk, a man all in.

  “Money. I have money for her.”

  “She doesn’t need money.”

  Haven touches the top of his head.

  “Doesn’t need money.”

  Cross flicks his hand westward.

 
“She’s running around the desert in a forty-year-old Land Rover, living on a diet of amphetamines and psychedelics, playing with robots, and occasionally crawling to the edge of civilization to do whatever piecework visual analysis you manage to scrape up for her.”

  His face tightens, brows drawing together, lips tensed.

  “She is.”

  He searches for the words to describe what she is and, finding them, spits them out.

  “A wasted resource.”

  No worse sin.

  He exhales, looks at the ceiling, appears about to smile but does not.

  “She’s what you have to offer us, Terrence.”

  He looks down from the ceiling.

  “You got her to leave Disaster City and go to Haiti. Either you can get her to go into the field for me or you cannot.”

  Terrence thinks about Haiti. The Pelican Case full of cash. How heavy it was.

  “There were lives to save in Haiti.”

  Cross allows this.

  “Are there not lives to be saved now?”

  Terrence knows there are. A vast number of lives that may be saved.

  Do they know?

  Still holding the top page of the contract Cross has offered him, he folds it over once, a letter fold, and uses his thumb to sharpen the crease.

  “If I can convince her. Security will be an issue.”

  Eyes shooting to Haven and back to the paper.

  “As I said. She won’t work with him. Obviously.”

  Cross shakes his head.

  “Haven has an asset already.”

  Terrence doesn’t look at Haven.

  “You have an asset.”

  Haven lifts a finger.

  “I have someone else for Jae.”

  Terrence folds the paper over again.

  “Rosalind?”

  Cross shakes his head.

  “We don’t like her for this. Too eccentric. Jae should travel with a stabilizing influence.”

  Haven lifts three fingers.

  “I have a team.”

  Terrence sharpens the second crease.

  “Team.”

  “Sloan. The new guy. Everybody wants to work with him. And two others. She’ll be bracketed. Highest-value asset. Sloan and his team, they’re very good.”

  Terrence looks at Cross.

  “Jae won’t want anyone from Kestrel.”

  Cross looks at the clocks over the door.

  “You have someone new, Terrence? Looking to package this job? Take a commission on the asset and her protection?”

  Terrence looks at the paper in his hands. It betrays no tremor, no sign of what is in his heart. It’s not too late to stop, he tells himself. But it is too late. And he wouldn’t stop even if he could.

  The abyss is at his feet. He steps into it with a word.

  “Skinner.”

  The atmosphere in the room changes with the speaking of the name. One’s ears might pop.

  The five clocks tick.

  Cross touches a button on his keyboard, and Terrence knows that however many devices may have been recording their conversation to this point, they have all gone dead.

  Cross looks at the surface of his black desk, magic mirror of an equally dark future.

  “Skinner is gone. You said. Never to return. You said.”

  He looks up from the black desk.

  “Was that not the truth?”

  “I never said dead.”

  For the first time since the conference began, Cross rises, fingertips pressing down bone-white on the black desktop.

  “If he’d been dead that would have been the ideal outcome, wouldn’t it have been? The list of people unsatisfied with that result would have been brief indeed. Fuck. Terrence. If he were dead, you might still own this company.”

  Terrence smiles.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  Cross appears to notice for the first time that he is standing. He lifts his hands from the desk, blood returning, pinking the skin.

  “It’s an absurd notion. A nonstarter. No.”

  Terrence looks at the carpet between his toes, nodding.

  “Like I said, I’ll likely never have another chance to twist your balls. So. No Skinner, no Jae.”

  Cross looks at the bank of clock faces.

  “He’s not viable.”

  Terrence looks at the clocks, watches a few seconds of Cross’s time whirl away.

  “Jae can give someone the inside track on the West-Tebrum attackers. Once word gets out that you have her, she’ll be targeted. I won’t run her out there in the open without the best protection. So she gets Skinner. Or you can’t have her.”

  Cross taps his teeth with his thumbnail, realizes what he’s doing, stops.

  “So strident, Terrence. So urgent.”

  He’s looking at the clocks again.

  “I would be concerned about his focus on the present.”

  Terrence is still holding the folded page of his contract. He opens it, glances inside, closes it.

  “If he’d wanted to do something about Montmartre, he would have done it a long time ago. And you wouldn’t be here now.”

  Cross looks at him.

  “No. Neither of us would be here.”

  He sits, and moves a manila folder to the center of his desk. Anachronistic luxury. He flips it open. A USB drive is taped inside the cover. From his angle, standing on the opposite side of the desk, Terrence can see a heavily redacted document, 70 percent thick black censor lines.

  “What will he want?”

  “Money.”

  “Yes. And?”

  Terrence is trying not to feel how carefully Haven is not looking at him. He tucks the contract away inside his jacket.

  “An asset. That’s all he ever wanted.”

  Cross closes the file.

  “Such a simple man.”

  He looks at the closed file, pushes it across the desk.

  “Details. An op for Jae. Now. And yes.”

  He looks at the clocks yet again, time the enemy.

  “You can have Skinner.”

  Haven rises, a single movement that seems to originate somewhere above his head, a force drawing him smoothly to his feet as his ankles and arms uncross.

  “Are we talking about this?”

  Cross looks at him, places a finger on the keyboard button he pressed minutes before.

  “We have talked about it, Haven.”

  He presses the button; recording resumed.

  “And now we are done talking about it.”

  Haven touches his fresh haircut.

  “Opposed.”

  He raises his voice slightly, speaks to the room.

  “For the record.”

  Cross types something, rapid fire.

  “Events are moving quickly, Terrence. I have to leave for Europe. Constant status reports. American lives are at risk. Let’s do our best to protect them. Patriots.”

  Haven is looking at Terrence now, very much so.

  “Patriots, Terrence. Remember to tell Skinner.”

  Exiting through the killbox atrium, Terrence squeezes the USB drive from the file between his thumb and forefinger, secure in the knowledge that Cross and Haven know he lied. But that they only know the lies he wanted them to know. The other lie, The Lie, they didn’t catch that one, had no hope of catching it, or of catching him.

  They are so smart. Such good liars themselves, they know when they are being lied to.

  But I’m the one who taught them how to lie so well.

  An hour later, in a Georgetown Internet café, he sends an email, calling Skinner back to the world.

  The monster summoned, he starts waiting to die, and is soon on a Lufthansa flight to Cologne, speeding toward that end.

  agents of taps

  JAE HAS BEEN parked across the highway from the motel for nearly an hour. She doesn’t want to go in. She’s begun to develop sores from sleeping in the Land Rover, not to mention an intimate sweaty reek that reminds her of day-o
ld undergraduate sex, but she does not want to go in.

  Still, a bed, a shower.

  She should have both before she shows up at Creech.

  It’s one thing to arrive two days late, another to show up reeking of road sweat, filthy from weeks of living in the desert, more than slightly wild-eyed: the residue of an admittedly ill-advised peyote experiment still wringing itself from her brain. The military expects a certain amount of eccentricity from freelance geniuses, but she suspects that she may have pushed somewhat beyond an acceptable level of quirks. Off in the desert, taking solo shamanistic journeys and playing with homemade robots. Over the border into crazy land. One of the many foreign lands where unsanctioned travel can result in one’s security clearances being revoked. A trip that ends with one’s file being moved from the Watchers drawer to the Watched.

  Jae does not want to be watched.

  A bed. A shower.

  She needs the job at Creech. Whatever it is, whatever it is they want her to see and understand for them, she needs the trickle of money it will release into her accounts. Money fuels her on the road. Keeps her off the grid and away from the torrents of media and information that swamp her compulsions, dragging her into an undertow of data that never resolves into the sense her mind insists is just below the surface. She needs to top off her account, check her PO box in Barstow, pick up some parts she ordered for the robots, speak to her dealer, maybe, and get back into the sand.

  She’s gonna have to go in that fucking motel and look at its shitting cable TV, for fuck sake, whether she wants to or not. She raises the Nikon Prostaff 12x25 binoculars to her eyes and looks out at the motel. Battered by decades of desert sun. Parched wood. A shallow foundation perched on little more than sand and gravel. What would it take from wind or rain to turn this shit box into kindling? That’s the peyote talking, backwash of paranoia at the end of any lengthy trip. Fuck it. Take a look.

  The Worm will tell her if there’s anything to fear.

  She returns the binoculars to the case dangling off a strap looped around the glove box handle. Checklist time. She checks the laces of her trail boots, making sure they’re tight. She checks the pockets of her safari vest, confirming that they hold her Garmin GPSMAP 62, Motorola Brute cell phone, a Uniden GMRS Two-Way radio with thirty-six-mile desert range, Leatherman Skeletool, three twenty-four-hundred-calorie food bars, a solar blanket, and a 3.1-liter CamelBak hydration pouch clipped to the shoulder rings. Julbo Micropores PT sunglasses on her face and jungle hat on her head. Hair and fingernails clipped to utilitarian lengths. Underwear mostly clean.