The Fading

by Christopher Ransom

  The flight crew made no announcement.

  Noel unbuckled his seat belt again and stood, looking over his shoulder before wading into the aisle. No one was behind him, and everyone ahead of him appeared to have been euthanized. A strong urge to shake one of them came over him, if only to make sure they weren’t dead. What in the name of God was this? What was he supposed to do? How long was he supposed to stand there and watch this before he started screaming at them, pounding on the cockpit door?

  He was standing in the center of the aisle, looking from the back of one head to another, waiting for something to happen, when a man in the front row stood up. He was tall, wearing a black suit, and the back of his head showed graying blond hair cut close, with curls on top, and a toughened neck of angry sunburned skin.

  As this man was edging into the aisle, a second rose beside him, and then a third. The other two were younger and shorter, but dressed in black suits, white dress shirts and dark ties that matched the larger man’s. The big guy turned in profile and gestured toward the exits. His underlings split – one to stand post at the front door for boarding, the other at the emergency exit over the wing. The latter was a short stocky guy with a tight face, black crew cut, and unhappy eyes, just eight rows ahead of Noel.

  Noel edged back into his row and sat quietly, his stomach doing barrel rolls of a different nature from when he had been sure they were going to crash.

  The tall man strode around the corner of the bulkhead and applied a short, shiny silver instrument to the jump-seated flight attendant’s neck, held it there while he looked at his watch for a few seconds, then returned to the center of the aisle, pocketing whatever device he’d just used on her.

  His two henchmen each withdrew a silver pistol with an oversized sight of some kind attached to the top and braced themselves, backs to the doors they were guarding. Noel thought it strange and not a good sign they weren’t surveying the cabin or its passengers, but merely staring straight ahead, guns held across their chests.

  Terrorism? A hijacking of some sort? Is this something averted or something happening?

  The answer came soon after the apparent superior of the threesome headed down the aisle toward Noel, when his haggard, squint-eyed features came into view, and Noel’s gaze fell to the hands. The man, who went six-five and could have hidden small children in his slacks, had the largest hands Noel had ever seen. The fingers were thick as drainpipes and as abrasive as cast iron, chapped pink and gray from some kind of exposure. It was the hands – one holding the shiny silver gauge at his side, the other now casually drawing a shiny silver pistol like the others from a shoulder holster inside his suit – that placed him in Noel’s memory.

  It was the man who’d been talking to the snow shoveler outside Noel’s apartment, arguing with the guy in his headphones while pretending they weren’t casing his ass more than four years earlier. Noel remembered thinking the older man was a former basketball player, watching those pink bananas jab the decoy in the chest before they sensed they, too, were being watched and moved on.

  Which meant he really should have rented a car and driven to Los Angeles, because this airplane was not malfunctioning. It had been commandeered and used to trap the thief, killer and possible threat to national security known as Noel Shaker.

  ‘I’ll start with the facts,’ the big man said, then paused to clear his throat before continuing evenly. His eyes passed over the empty rows and seats without fixing on any one position, and he seemed curious but not especially concerned. ‘My name is Wade Anlun and I am a senior asset within an agency of the United States government that does not hand out titles. My colleagues and I have taken control of the aircraft. No one on board has been harmed and we are here to ensure that doesn’t change between now and landing. I am one of twelve men in the employ of this Great Republic who know who and what you are, Noel Shaker. I have been following you and studying you and at times chasing you, for seven years. I know most of what you have done during that time. With respect to your actions in Las Vegas, Nevada, I know everything. We have enough film to screen a mini-series.

  ‘More facts: I do not give two shits that you have stolen millions or taken human life, deserved or undeserved. It is not my goal to arrest you and punish you for your crimes, though both are well within my authority and jurisdiction. My interests may shift in these directions if you attempt to run, hide, harm me or any of my men, several of whom you cannot see right now any better than we can see you. Understand now, you cannot run or hide, because you have been contained. We know you are on board. We have simple technology that has told us so. We have you, and you will deplane with us, willingly. Between now and touchdown, we have much to discuss. You may resist my overtures but doing so will not help you or the people you love, some of whom are also in our custody.’

  No one answering the home phone.

  ‘Final facts: you and I will speak now, face to face. You will show yourself and engage me as a gentleman of goodwill until our arrival, at which time we will conclude our business at a secure location of my choosing. I will personally guarantee your safety as long as you honor mine. We will discuss a certain responsibility of yours that I hope you will see as an opportunity to save yourself from imprisonment, physical and psychological dissection, and more than likely an early and needless death.

  ‘You have sixty seconds to show your agreement to these terms by revealing yourself. If the minute ends and I cannot see you, hands raised, you will be considered a treasonous hostile enemy of the United States of America and of me personally, and you will never see Julie Wagner alive for so long as you live, which, I promise, won’t be through the end of the week. Proceed.’

  Non-Agent Wade Anlun stowed his firearm and raised a cuff to look at his watch.

  The other two guards or bagmen or whatever they were pivoted from the door and trained their guns down the aisle in a crossing pattern, their expressions betraying no emotion whatsoever.

  Noel stood up in his row and dropped his blinding web, manifesting before them in the amount of time required to unfasten a seat belt. He raised his open palms.

  Anlun looked up and met his eyes with a tired, unimpressed nod. He walked to Noel’s row and sat in the aisle seat, boxing the obvious line of escape. He gestured to the window seat and Noel complied. The big man said nothing for a minute or two as the plane cruised and Noel entertained visions of hi-tech prison cells, needles in the forehead, surgeries, a bunker in a mountain where he would spend the rest of his life.

  ‘Well, I guess congratulations are in order,’ Anlun said at last.

  Noel swallowed and unfastened the top button of his shirt. ‘For?’

  Anlun turned and smiled at him. ‘You’ve graduated into the big leagues.’

  Then, while the rest of the passengers slept off their sedative gas, he explained what he had in mind.

  40

  The jet touched down at Los Angeles International with only the faintest of bumps and all but the three operational people in the cockpit – plus Noel, Anlun and his personnel – slept through it. The pilot taxied them to a leg at the southernmost end of the airport’s U-shaped terminals and into a maintenance hangar. Anlun did not wait for the seatbelt sign to change before standing. His agents had stood guard, guns drawn, all through the flight and landing, but had not pointed their weapons in Noel’s direction since the boss finished his speech.

  When the plane rocked to a halt, Anlun stepped back to clear Noel’s row and gestured. ‘After you.’

  Noel stood and walked up the aisle, averting his eyes from the sleeping passengers, but was unable to keep himself from looking down at the sleeping flight attendant in the jump seat. She was drooling and would probably wake with a very sore neck, but otherwise seemed to be fine. The door was closed and the agent guarding it stared through Noel without expression. Noel turned to Anlun, awaiting instructions.

  Anlun said, ‘The door, Stieglitz.’

  ‘Sir.’ The agent stowed his firearm and unloc
ked the hatch.

  A rolling stepladder was already in place. Stieglitz went first, scanning the empty building as he descended. Noel took his cue and went next, with Anlun bringing up the rear. Noel did not see the one who’d been guarding the emergency door over the wing exit the plane. He imagined someone was going to stay, to take care of the sleepers.

  ‘What’s going to happen to them?’ Noel asked when they reached the tarmac.

  Anlun walked to his left and slightly behind him. ‘They’ll wake up in about fifteen minutes and be given a speech by the pilot as medical personnel board to help them off in a smooth, orderly fashion. Everyone will be examined in the portable triage tents and trucks on their way now. The risks and details of their ordeal, the ventilation malfunction, will be explained. Then they’ll be sent to their destinations. Don’t concern yourself with them. We’ve done this a few times.’

  Anlun steered Noel toward a large black SUV that had pulled up, the center vehicle in a trio of the same. Another agent exited the passenger side and held the second door open for them.

  ‘You’re not worried they’ll talk?’ Noel said.

  Anlun was sucking from a bottle of water he’d acquired sometime between landing and thirty seconds ago. ‘Of course they’ll talk. They’ll tell everyone they know, the media, their lawyers. Some of them will make a little money from it, the airline will settle out of court, Uncle Sam will pick up the tab. The pilot and his crew are under non-disclosures from the Attorney General and they will honor that if they ever want to fly again. And, seeing as how pilots hate nothing more than being grounded, none of this will mean a thing. It was a ventilation malfunction. Now, hop in.’

  Noel got into the truck. Anlun sank into the leather beside him. Stieglitz took the passenger seat and the driver, another drone with oiled blond hair, led them out of the hangar as a convoy of half a dozen ambulances and a dozen supply trucks, their sirens off, wheeled around the corner. They left the terminals for a service road and within five minutes were on public streets moving away from the airport. Noel watched as the palm trees clicked by down the center median until they looped right and around up onto the massive 405 Freeway with four or five more lanes of traffic that never got above forty miles per hour.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said, facing Anlun beside him. ‘If you kept track of me using the cameras, why didn’t casino security grab me sooner?’

  Stieglitz handed Anlun a small case of black leather. Anlun unzipped the case and flipped through half a dozen DVDs stored in the transparent pages, then removed one.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ He inserted the disc into the overhead player and the monitors in the seat backs flickered to life, screening the same footage.

  The view was black and white, as on closed-circuit, shot from the eye or eyes in the sky at Caesars Palace. After jumping from one camera to another, bouncing from gaming tables to a hall to the front lobby, it settled on a bar raised on a dais, then roved and zoomed in until Noel saw his old friend Tilly arriving with a tray of empty glasses. No sound accompanied the feed.

  ‘There’s you getting shit-faced,’ Anlun said without a trace of merriment.

  Indeed, Noel was hanging onto the bar beside her, looking up at her, his mouth moving through the conversation they’d shared the night he was fired. This went on for a few minutes before Tilly left and he went back to his video poker.

  ‘We could have taken you now or at any time leading up to this,’ Anlun said. ‘But we were waiting for Dalton to find you.’

  ‘You knew about Dalton?’ Noel said, incredulous.

  Anlun gave him a look.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’

  Anlun paused the video. ‘He was on hiatus and we needed to see how you would respond to his overtures. If he would guide you to a higher level of control, which he apparently did, though not in the way we had predicted. We also needed to know if you would go far enough without going too far. As you have gathered, this little talent of yours has certain properties corrosive to the average society’s notion of acceptable morality. On a scale of one to ten, one being Mother Teresa, ten being a total poisoned psychopath who eats his victims out of sheer boredom or gases political opposition with all the bother of my wife making a bowl of microwave popcorn, Dalton was a solid eight-point-seven. We needed to see how far you pushed the needle on the scale.’

  ‘What’s my number?’ Noel said.

  Anlun shrugged. ‘If we were concerned with that, you’d be dead right now.’

  Noel shook his head in disgust.

  ‘Here,’ Anlun said, pressing play.

  The footage switched locations and times. Now Noel was standing at the roulette table on his birthday, by himself except for the croupier, Sable. He won the first bet of three hundred, then the second on black 29 for over twenty-five thousand. The short guest services manager and the Amazonian waitress arrived. A small group of strollers gathered to watch. He played again, hitting the monster score on black 29. Commotion broke out, people crowded in, the guest services manager took Sable aside. The peanut gallery shouted and booed the manager as he shut the table down. Then everyone froze and looked around in shock, confusion, heads turning this way and that. Noel didn’t understand what was happening until he saw himself, a random body, walking away from the table with his arms raised in victory. No one saw him leaving. He’d just ‘vanished’.

  ‘They couldn’t see me,’ he said. ‘But the cameras got me.’

  ‘Which is to be expected, knowing what we know about the nature of your psychic abilities.’ Anlun pressed pause again.

  ‘I’m not psychic,’ Noel said. ‘I can’t tell the future.’ Although I have communed with the dead from time to time.

  ‘Psychic, medium, paratalent,’ Anlun said with a smirk. ‘You’re all mindfuckers to me.’

  Maybe that’s it, Noel thought. Psychics, mediums, paratalents, faders … what do all of us ‘mindfuckers’ have in common? We tap into something on the other side. Or deep inside. In the place where time bends like a pretzel, showing us past and future, where perception and reality blur into the same warped movie, where the restless dead can still reach an audience. Maybe the fading is but one road on a great big map of highways and rail lines, impossible to travel without glimpsing some of the roadside carnage. We become conduits, flypaper for all kinds of—

  ‘Am I boring you?’ Anlun said.

  Noel rubbed his eyes. ‘You all? How many of us do you know?’

  Anlun took another book of discs from the agent up front and fanned the pages at Noel. ‘This is about five hundred hours of footage from your spree of muggings. We have you in seven different casinos committing forty-six acts. There’s a lot more where you’re not stealing but watching, following, shadowing victims.’

  ‘But why didn’t security stop me? You control them, too?’

  ‘We pulled a few strings,’ Anlun said. ‘But mostly we let them try. We could have let them get you, if and when you manifested, and taken you into custody by pulling rank. But most of the time they never got close to you.’

  Anlun fast-forwarded through some boring casino traffic, then paused just as an entourage of Chinese men in suits lost something valuable and spread out in a panic. Noel saw himself breaking away from the rearguard, a thick padded envelope under one arm, for only half a dozen steps before he bent and slipped it, unnoticed, under the carriage of a passing baby stroller pushed by a couple who were busy watching the Chinese men curse and run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Noel was visible to the camera and it all looked ludicrously obvious he’d stolen the packet, but of course no one on the floor could see him. Less than a minute later hotel security flocked in but Noel had already stepped out of frame, following the baby stroller. He remembered that one now, reclaiming his parcel in the elevator just as the couple shoved the stroller onto their floor.

  ‘The camera has you there,’ Anlun said. ‘But when security descended upon the scene, “you” weren’t where you were su
pposed to be, or anywhere to be seen. The eyes in the sky had you, the human eyes couldn’t keep you.’

  ‘They never thought to communicate with the guys in the control room?’ Noel said. ‘In real time, tracking and spotting me? How hard could it have been?’

  Anlun frowned. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t have this worked out on your own? That you were counting on dumb luck?’

  Noel’s face colored.

  ‘Or maybe you knew you would be safe in either event,’ Anlun said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Think about that for a minute. It wasn’t just the people on the ground. You started burning the others.’

  Noel seized upon it. ‘The eyes in the sky. I fooled the cameras? That’s not possible, is it?’

  ‘No, not the cameras,’ Anlun said. ‘Technology is cold, inanimate. It’s not sentient and it doesn’t lie. Your juju doesn’t work on mechanical recording devices, so far as we know. You took out the people watching the monitors. The entire staff, the guests. Frankly we still don’t know how hard you pushed and how far you reached out.’

  ‘Okay. So, they never found me because they didn’t think to look for me,’ Noel said. ‘They didn’t see me onscreen at all, so they had no idea what or who they were looking for.’

  Anlun said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘But couldn’t they go back and watch the tapes? I mean, the cameras had me. They record this stuff, keep it on file for weeks or months, right? Are you telling me they never bothered to look back, even after the number of muggings went up?’

  ‘They did go back,’ Anlun said. ‘We screened it for them, and it still didn’t work. The ones who were in the building when you did your thing could not pick you out on screen.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You didn’t just disappear. You erased these people’s perception of you, their ability to see you at all, permanently.’

  ‘How does that work?’ Noel said.

  ‘You tell me,’ Anlun said.

  Noel’s head ached.