Skinner

by Charlie Huston

  The willowy Swedes behind the desk, boy and girl, impeccably well mannered, both genetically equipped to pursue successful modeling careers if they chose to do so, but neither radiating the least bit of sexuality, appear culturally tuned to a lower frequency of nonverbal communication than Jae’s piercingly high bandwidth. Whether genuinely or professionally oblivious to her displeasure, they are fortunate to find the messages beamed from her eyes indecipherable. Scarring might otherwise be permanent. Unscathed, they offer further apologies accented by excellent state-supported university educations, the toots of their Swedish vowels rounded by British English lessons, consonants hardened by Hollywood movies and TV.

  The building housing the Hotel Hellsten is old and European. The elevator is therefore very small, though mercifully modern. The room is on the top floor, attic, an unusually large amount of floor space rendered moot by two thick wood posts jutting into the room to support the steep angle of roof beams that even Jae must duck under.

  She stands inside the door, looking at the two narrow beds pressed close together, studying the options for moving them a maximum distance apart.

  “Do you snore?”

  Skinner has already placed his bag on the foot of one of the beds and begun unpacking a few items, his dock kit, a clean shirt, socks, underwear.

  “No.”

  Jae hasn’t taken off her daypack. The larger duffel that she checked through from Heathrow is in her hands.

  “You sure about that?”

  Skinner is shaking out a blue oxford button-down with white stripes, taking a hanger from the tiny wardrobe next to the bathroom door.

  “Yes.”

  She drops the duffel on a luggage rack that appears to have been made from a wooden frame that was once used to mount especially heavy loads on the back of a long-extinct pack animal.

  Skinner hangs up his shirt.

  “I’m going to shower.”

  And steps into the bathroom with his clean underthings and dock kit, closing the door behind himself, the sound of running water almost immediate.

  Jae moves to the large windows that look out into the courtyard behind the hotel. Dozens of windows, some covered, some open to voyeurs, walls painted mustard, brick red, dark green, rooftops all steep and black, a building directly across from theirs featuring a rounded wing that extends into the shared back space like the tower of a castle. The sky is low, the light gray, one splash of sun on the top of that tower. She feels the weight of travel and time zones. But she’s not ready to sleep.

  Work.

  She turns on the TV, cycles through the channels, finds Al Jazeera English to be most relevant to the data she wants to process, opens her laptop, plugs it into a current-adapter, sets up an account with the hotel’s Wi-Fi and launches Google Earth, tapping in the Stockholm billing address Maker Smith gave her for the server account from which Swedish commands to ReStuxnet were traced, then opens Twitter and sets up a new user, h3dcaz3, connects it to an email account she uses exclusively for crap like this, and runs searches on some terms before setting alerts for a series of established hashtags related to the protests: #bilderbergstockholm, #WTOCON, #anarchyinstockholm, #proteststockholm, and several others of the like. The tweets in a stream in one corner of her screen. She plugs Terrence’s USB into Skinner’s machine and clicks it open. Sitting on the bed, a laptop on either side of her, glancing from one to the other, clicking as curiosity and random connections suggest themselves, glancing at the TV, listening to the European, American, Asian, and Middle Eastern broadcasters report stories in English every bit as educated and multicultural as that spoken by the runway model desk clerks, telling stories of a world that sound as though they might have been invented from whole cloth. So alien from what she hears at home, but she knows well that these tales are simply what is happening at the far end of the spyglass that those young airmen are viewing on their video screens back at Creech.

  She clicks, deeper, more to see.

  Her eyes only once flicking to the closed bathroom door, shower sounds. Once, maybe twice, then she’s gone in the data, using that flaw in her own code to find the obscure.

  Her back hurts, aches, and she realizes that the pain hasn’t just drawn her from the data, it has woken her up. She opens her eyes. The light in the room has changed. The lamp has been switched off, both her screens gone stand-by black. Al Jazeera still plays on the TV, but the image is washed out by the bright sunlight streaming in the window. Jae scoots to the edge of her bed, straightens her back, winces as it pops at alarming volume, the noise waking Skinner, or, at least, causing him to open his eyes.

  He sits up on his bed, inches from her own, where he had been stretched flat on his back, hands folded over his stomach, in knit boxer shorts and a white V-neck t-shirt. His hair is slightly mussed but looks freshly washed, and his shave is close. His skin is pale, sharp tan lines at his neck and wrists, a man rarely in the sun and never in leisure wear when he is. There’s a long scar along the back of his elbow, starting halfway to his shoulder and running halfway to his wrist, it looks surgical. He curls his toes and then straightens them and they crackle. Three of them are missing.

  “You fell asleep.”

  Jae stands, hunched, stiff, hands on hips, slowly arching, well aware how easy it is to pull a muscle on mornings like this.

  “Yeah. Didn’t realize it was that late when we got in. What’s the daylight savings situation here?”

  Skinner rises, takes a pair of gray lightweight wool trousers from a hanger; they’ve been ironed.

  “It’s a bit after twelve noon, Jae. Our flight got in at seven-thirty in the morning. Same day. We’ve been here about five hours.”

  He pulls on the flat-front pants, two buttons, zip, tucks in his t.

  “Can you sleep more?”

  Jae thinks about it.

  “No. I’m wide awake.”

  Skinner has his blue-and-white oxford, also ironed.

  “Get cleaned up and we’ll go find food. Then the address.”

  Jae is already digging her own dock kit from her backpack, the magic towel, underthings, a master of her personal form of light travel.

  “Ten minutes.”

  Jae turns on the water and begins to strip, trying not to fall back into the contents of the USB, the strata of materials Terrence dumped on the partition. The op file contains the usual mission parameters, nondisclosure agreement, meal allotments, reimbursement procedure, call-in numbers, online and physical dead drops, contact protocol, mortality benefit for next of kin. All standard. The rest of it, some seems to directly apply to the job, history of West-Tebrum, from Gilded Age robber baron mining and shipping giant to twentieth-century utility to whatever kind of global energy and information conglomerate it is trying to evolve into. But the partition consists of random pits of data. Terrence’s own banking records. Expense reports for his incorporated consultancy from conventions and conferences he attended as many as fifteen years ago. PowerPoint presentations from the same events. Action assessments from Top Secret operations, scans of the original documents, postredaction, most of the text blacked out. Pages of links, a large number of them dead or broken, quickly copied and pasted into a single document, also stories and posts about Cross and Kestrel Dynamics. Traditional press coverage in the New York Times, hacktivist blogging following one of the WikiLeaks document dumps that included details of a Kestrel ground op in Afghanistan that resulted in thirteen collateral civilian deaths, video of Cross’s testimony to more than one congressional hearing over the years, an art form that he has mastered in all of its many theatrical formalities, corporate disclosures tracing Kestrel holdings and subsidiaries, and, no favorites here in Terrence-Land, similar files on Kestrel competitors like Mission One and Hann-Aoki. Also, crushing piles of climate change data and reportage, heaps of it dating back to the quaint era when it was still referred to as global warming. Terrence appeared to have been a ground-floor believer, or at least to have taken an early interest in the national secu
rity aspects of the weather’s becoming an enemy. He’d certainly written and rewritten no end of memos and briefs on the subject, all of the paper copies burned to a crisp, no doubt, but nothing that appeared, thus far in her digging, to have resulted in a budget for him to do anything, create detailed projections, draft protocols for action operations in response to climate-related security threats. More recently, very, he’d been tracking shock waves coming out of the global financial meltdown, catching up to them, trying, it looked to her, to predict where and what they would shake next.

  Austerity measures.

  A search term he’d been employing in an astonishing number of variations. Early hits overwhelmingly favored associations with Greece and Ireland, quickly expanding to take in Portugal, Iceland, Spain, and Italy. More recently the two words had been coming back with the initials USA in close proximity.

  Other terms he’d been tracking.

  Emerging economies.

  Chinese Miracle.

  Favela.

  Urban population.

  Contraction theory.

  Delhi blackout.

  Food shortage.

  Byzantine Hades.

  Renegade credit events.

  IMF lending.

  Arab Spring.

  Occupy.

  Floating armories.

  Pocket reactor.

  Pussy Riot.

  Icepack melt.

  Naxalite.

  Bradley Manning.

  Global Guerrillas.

  Power plants online.

  26/11 2008.

  And, Jesus, it went on. He’d been saving the history tables from marathon online sessions, copying them and pasting them into Word docs just as he’d done with old links.

  “What the fuck, Terrence?”

  The words coming out of her mouth, waking her to an awareness that she’s standing nude in the middle of the bathroom, steam rolling out of the top of the shower cabinet, the mirror in front of her fogged, her reflection a shadow as vague and insubstantial as Terrence’s motives for dumping all that crap into what was supposed to be an operation brief.

  “Seriously, Terrence, what the fuck?”

  Remembering then, Terrence is dead, and she is traveling with the man who may have killed him.

  gamla stan

  SKINNER DIDN’T MEAN to be cheeky when he picked the restaurant. It was suggested by one of the models at the front desk, reliable and within walking distance. He’d focused on that, not bothering to ponder the implications of the rest of the description.

  Also quite local and fun.

  Sitting now at a table with a hammer-and-sickle USSR flag hanging over it, the walls, floor, and ceiling all painted scarlet, a portrait of Marx on the cover of the menus and a bust of Stalin over the bar, he is having trouble finding anything about a Soviet-themed restaurant that feels either local or fun.

  But Jae is ravaging the reindeer chop on her plate, her initial hostility toward the establishment apparently diminishing as it is displaced by large mouthfuls of bloody protein.

  “Gamla Stan.”

  For the moment the communist implications of the name KGB Bar seem to be attracting not a small number of distinctly nonlocal patrons favoring matted dreadlocks, anarchy t-shirts, hemp moccasins, black bandanas tied around their necks in preparation for being pulled over their mouths and noses in the event of teargas or photographers, smartphones in heavy duty construction-site-worthy cases, and backpacks that sound when they move as if they are filled with rattle cans of spray paint. Their phones have been set out on tabletops to be pondered and discussed as meals progress. An odd, though peaceful enough, scene at a place that doesn’t look as though it typically does much lunch business, but there is a bit of frisson in the air as many of the protesters realize that communist décor does not certify commune-like pricing, nor does it guarantee vegan options on the menu.

  Skinner swallows a bite of stew. Well-cooked meats are a habit, fewer chances of foodborne illness; vomiting and diarrhea proven to be impediments to action.

  “Gamla Stan?”

  Jae uses the caveman knife they’d given her, suited to sawing small limbs from trees, to carve another dripping hunk off her chop.

  “Gamla Stan. That’s where the address Smith gave me is. Whoever is hosting on the server that sent Swedish commands to ReStuxnet is having it billed to a Gamla Stan address. The server is somewhere outside of the city. One of the suburbs. Whatever passes for a business park in Sweden. But the billing address is Gamla Stan. We want to find who launched the West-Tebrum attack, that’s our next stop.”

  She shoves the meat in her mouth.

  “Fuck this is good.”

  Pink juice runs from the corner of her mouth and she wipes it with the back of her hand, making eye contact as she does so with an especially skinny young man a few tables away who seems to have twigs woven into his beard and has been looking at her and shaking his head as she devours her meal.

  She smiles, teeth slicked red, a piece of gristle poking out from between her molars.

  He looks away.

  She swallows.

  “Better look somewhere else, asshole.”

  Outside the restaurant, zipping her Mountain Hardware jacket, Jae nods toward the stairs that lead from Malmskillnadsgatan, dropping down a narrow block of Tunnelgatan, crossing Luntmakargatan to Sveavägen.

  “This way.”

  She walks in that direction, starting down the stairs.

  “The phones are key.”

  Skinner takes two steps at once, putting himself next to her.

  “Phones.”

  She waves a hand back in the direction of KGB.

  “They’re using them to spontaneously organize the protests.”

  She puts her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

  “I was following some of the feeds. Twitter, mostly. Also some Facebook. Modern tools of revolution. It won’t be televised, but it will be online. Until governments decide to turn it off.”

  Skinner is looking at a graffito on the wall next to the stairs. A single-color line drawing, cartoon, political, a vampire jabbing its fangs into the earth, WTO spelled out on its cape. He thinks of the protesters in the restaurant, the sound of spray cans clanking in their packs. Was there red paint on the fingers of the twig-bearded young man back there? Red, same shade as the drops spurting from the earth as the WTO vampire on the wall sucks away? The paint has a slight glisten in some spots, still damp.

  “Like the London riots.”

  “Sure. Arab Spring. Occupy. Cyprus. Syria. Crowdsource protests. Classic cell structure. Radical decentralization. Anyone with a phone can play. It’s about as lo-fi hi-tech as you can get, and it works insanely well.”

  Skinner looks back up the stairs again, KGB, the protesters inside, far from the Swedish World Trade Center, studying their phones. Far from the police lines and clashes.

  “Would you say this is typical? The size and extent?”

  Hands in pockets, she flaps her elbows.

  “It’s bigger than the typical protests for WTO and Bilderberg. But holding them in the same city at the same time. It’s unprecedented. There is no typical. But.”

  She stops walking.

  “The scale is. Unusual. Not consistent with. No, not the scale. The level of. Organization is the wrong word. But the news coverage I’ve seen, the Twitter feeds I was following at the hotel. The stuff we saw coming in from Arlanda. It feels like.”

  She closes her eyes.

  “Like something has accelerated. Like the politicals and apoliticals who get drawn to these things have accelerated their development along some kind of evolutionary curve. Faster. Anomaly. That acceleration. But.”

  She opens her eyes.

  “I don’t know if that’s important. To us.”

  Skinner looks west, toward the WTC nexus of unrest.

  “Will they win?”

  She blinks.

  “Win what?”

  She starts walking.

 
“The protesters have to have at least one central communications cell somewhere in the city, and a bunch of people freelancing for them. Aggregating TV coverage, Facebook posts, Twitter, Skype calls from the streets. They blast it back out on their own Facebook pages and Twitter streams, battlefield-quality real-time feedback. Works as long as the network can handle the traffic of a major international monetary conference, the protesters, and the old media. These guys are live-mapping on Google. Flash protests and police response.”

  She squints.

  “Terrence was interested in the technology, how it’s applied in street movements. Stuff about that in the USB partition. How it will evolve in the future.”

  Skinner has been walking with his hands in his pockets.

  “Terrence likes the future. Thinking about it.”

  Jae cocks an ear, eyes on her boots, fitting, he assumes, what he is saying into whatever is happening inside her odd brain.

  “He talked about the future when he called me for this gig.”

  Skinner nods.

  “He grew up in the cold war, got his start at the CIA when Vietnam was winding down, studied at the feet of the guys who started it all. We used to talk. He said each new strategy, point of view, is built on top of what was already there. Old behaviors are never discouraged, they’re encoded in the system. The community. So what we do now, all the private sector work, Homeland Security, Kestrel, fourth-generation warfare, asymmetrical threats, it’s all built on top of cold war thinking. Even for terrorists, the technology has changed. But the thinking. Consistent.”

  He is thinking about Terrence’s voice.

  “I miss him.”

  Jae looks up from her boots.

  “Do you?”

  One end of Skinner’s scarf has come untucked from his jacket, flapping slightly in the breeze coming up Sveavägen.