Black Helicopters

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “No,” Johnson had told him, grabbing for the cylinder, no matter how it was scaring him shitless. “That goes right the fuck overboard.”

  “Screw you, Bartleby,” Ahmed said. “It’s mine. It cost dear, and it is mine.” There had ensued a tussle that ended in Johnson sporting a newly chipped incisor and Ahmed an eye that would go black and blue as storm clouds. But Johnson had given up. He threatened to report Ahmed to the selectmen, but that hadn’t made any difference. He threatened never again to play chess with Ahmed, and, again, no dice. Johnson sat on the floor below the porthole, sweating and teasing the damaged tooth with the tip of his tongue.

  “You ain’t gonna open that, you crazy son of a bitch. Even you’re not that daft.”

  But then Ahmed did pop the seal. There was an audible hiss and a subsequent series of clicks as the cylinder released the inner capsule. A fog of liquid oxygen or nitrogen billowed from the violated artifact, and when it cleared Johnson saw what had been shut away more than one hundred and one years: clamped firmly in place between steel rods, a glowing tube, maybe thirty-five, maybe forty milliliters. Whatever was in the tube had a pearlescent quality about it, and it glowed ever so slightly in the twilight filling up the cabin.

  “You got no inkling what that shit is,” Johnson said.

  “Isn’t that the marvel of it?”

  “I ought to murder you in your sleep, you bastard. Slit your throat, toss that shit overboard myself.” Johnson hadn’t meant it, but he was frightened, and his tooth hurt, and he has always been apt to blurt such threats in the heat of the moment.

  Ahmed shrugged. “If you gotta, then you gotta,” he said, and gazed in wonder at the pearly tube before shutting and sealing the cylinder again.

  So, thinks Johnson, sitting on the edge of his bunk, so somehow the military got word and came for it. Might be they’ve been doggin’ that can around for tens and tens, and Ahmed gets it, and they get Ahmed. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Fuck.”

  That’s when Johnson happens to glance at the shelf that holds Ahmed’s books, and right off he notices one, and only one, is missing. The White Queen.

  “Fuck us all,” he whispers and lies down and stares at the underside of Ahmed’s bunk. Soon enough, it’ll be someone else’s bunk.

  12.: If I Should Fall from Grace with God

  (Borrisokane, County Tipperary, 18/10/2012)

  The air inside the safehouse stinks of mildew and stale tobacco smoke, of Indian takeaway and pine-scented disinfectant. Of failure and desperation and of waiting. And, above all, uncertainty. Once upon a time, the shabby little two-room cottage on the outskirts of Borrisokane was an IRA safehouse, sheltering Nationalist fugitives from the North, fleeing the bloody consequences of their patriotic chores. It was not quite so shabby back then. The walls inside the cottage are whitewashed brick and stone, whitewash gone grey from soot and mold and neglect. The floor is bare concrete with only a few filthy throw rugs tossed about here and there. There’s electricity, but no running water, and the roof leaks when it rains, which means the roof leaks quite frequently. There are two portable space heaters that make no difference whatsoever—but it’s the thought that counts. There’s a room with two cots. There’s a hot plate and a kettle, a mini-fridge, a few pots and pans. There’s a table crowded with computer and surveillance equipment, sheltered by a yellow polyester tarpaulin. There’s a crucifix hung on one wall, like a grudging concession to history. There’s a fireplace no one ever uses anymore. There are windows, but they’ve all been discreetly painted over.

  The assassin’s name is Nora Swann—at least, that’s the name she’s worn for the past seven years—and this is where she’s been hiding since the great cock-up in Dublin three days ago. This is where her wounds were treated, and this is where she’s being debriefed. When she was a younger woman, she worked exclusively for the CIA—in West Berlin, mostly. At her chosen trade she believed herself to be the best of the best, an unquestioned artist with a rifle and scope. But her ambitions led her farther down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and now she’s pushing fifty, and Nora serves Albany and the men in black suits and tinfoil hats who answer to no one.

  Nora Swann sits on a metal folding chair and squints through her own cigarette smoke at the images projected onto one of the whitewashed walls—CCTV footage from all those days ago, the Dublin fruit and vegetable market fronting Mary’s Lane and St. Michan’s Street, that vast shed of Victorian stone and ironwork, glazed brick and terra-cotta archways, vaulted skylights to let the unreliable Irish sun shine down on the stalls and the customers and the sellers of onions and tulips. Her thoughts are muddy from pain and from the painkillers, and her stomach is sour from antibiotics and bitter black coffee.

  “Nora, we’re going to go over it again,” says the well-dressed woman who has flown all the way from America to question her and try and make sense of this mess.

  “How many times will this make now?” asks Nora Swann, not expecting an answer, and then she blows smoke at the images projected on the wall.

  “Do you actually think that matters?” asks the woman from Albany.

  “No,” replies Nora Swann. “No, of course not.”

  On the wall, Dubliners peruse seemingly endless rows of cabbages and leeks, apples and pears, roses and calla lilies. Men with hand trucks trundle by, hauling wooden produce crates stacked six or seven high. Merchants talk among themselves or with their customers. It’s any market day. It is nothing remarkable, whatsoever. The sight of it triggers in the assassin the memory of the smell of the place, the chilly autumnal air heavy with the commingled odors of growing things. She forces herself not to look away.

  “How many weapons were you carrying that day?” asks the well-dressed woman.

  “Only the one,” Nora Swann tells her.

  “And that one was?”

  “Same as last time I answered this question, and same as all the times before that. The Glock 17 nine-millimeter, fitted with an external suppressor.”

  “That morning, had you suffered any unusual symptoms prior to the encounter, any discomforts? Headaches, nausea, vertigo, a persistent ringing in the ears, any peculiar tastes or smells, anything at all of that sort?”

  “No, not before. I was fine before. Before, I was right as rain.”

  “And you’re quite sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m quite sure about that.”

  “Were you wearing gloves?” asks the well-dressed woman.

  “Yes, I was wearing gloves,” answers Nora Swann. “Black kidskin over latex. Same as always.” She takes a last drag off the cigarette, then leans over and stubs it out against one leg of the metal folding chair. She drops the butt onto the concrete floor at her feet. The cigarettes she’s been smoking since she arrived at the safehouse in Borrisokane aren’t her brand, and she doesn’t like the taste they leave in her mouth, but they’re better than having nothing at all.

  The projected image changes angle, switches to video recorded by a different camera mounted in a different location within the market. And there she is, splashed across the wall, just another Monday a.m. shopper. Nothing to see here, not after more than two decades spent learning to blend in, learning not to stand out or draw attention to herself. When it comes to mimicry, chameleons and octopuses have nothing on her.

  “Are you subject to nightmares?” asks the well-dressed woman from Albany.

  “What the fuck do you think?” replies Nora Swann.

  “Night terrors, night sweats, anxiety attacks, insomnia, sleep paralysis?”

  “No, no, no. Yes, no.”

  “Last time, regarding night sweats, you replied in the affirmative,” says the well-dressed woman. “Deviation noted.”

  Nora Swann rubs her eyes, then looks at the images on the wall again. You’d imagine the spooks back in New York could spring for an actual screen, she thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. On the wall, she’s carrying a shopping basket holding three containers of gooseberries and a plastic bag of
lemons. She’d already explained to one vendor that she was making preserves, following her grandmother’s recipe. That morning, her Drogheda brogue had been perfection, and never you mind that she was born and raised in Iowa.

  “Tell me,” says the well-dressed woman, “on the morning of Monday, October 15, what were your mission objectives?”

  “The psychiatrist and the albino,” says Nora Swann. “Locate and tweep. Keep it simple. Nothing showy.”

  “I believe you were provided with their names during the briefing,” says the well-dressed woman. “Tell me their names, please.”

  “I wasn’t given their names, but you know that. I was only shown photographs. I wasn’t given either of their names.”

  On the whitewashed wall of the rundown cottage, the projector switches to images gleaned from footage confiscated from a third CCTV camera at the market. The video has changed from black and white to color. There are two figures surrounded by a sea of peonies, bundles of flowers displayed in aluminum pails, a rainbow splashed across the market floor.

  “Those are the two individuals?” asks the woman from Albany, and she nods at the screen.

  “Yeah,” says Nora Swann. “That’s them. Just like every time before.”

  “Your attitude is being noted,” says the woman. It almost sounds like a warning.

  “Blow me,” replies Nora Swann. “My shoulder hurts, I’m sick of these bullshit menthol cigarettes, and I need some fucking sleep. Note all that, too, while you’re at it.”

  The woman from Albany doesn’t take the bait. She’s an iceberg, this one.

  On the wall, there’s a woman with red hair, frizzy ginger hair tied back from her face. She’s wearing glasses. There’s a much younger woman with her, holding her right hand. The psychiatrist and the albino. The psychiatrist is wearing a cream-colored cable-knit sweater and jeans. The albino is wearing jeans, a black turtleneck, and a beige raincoat. There’s a leather messenger bag on the red-haired woman’s right shoulder, and she’s holding a bouquet of calla lilies in her free hand. Seeing the two of them again, Nora Swann tenses and her stomach lurches. It doesn’t matter how many times she’s been made to watch this footage since the American arrived, Nora’s reaction is always, invariably the same.

  “Are you going to vomit this time?” asks the well-dressed woman.

  “I don’t think so,” Nora Swann tells her, but there’s a plastic bucket on the floor, just in case.

  “And, forgive me, Nora, but I have to be absolutely sure of this—you’re entirely certain, these are the two women you were assigned to find on Monday morning?”

  “Yes, those are the two women.”

  “But you don’t know their names?”

  “No, I wasn’t provided that intel. It wasn’t in the dossier. It wasn’t part of my briefing in Manchester. I have no idea what their names are.”

  “Tell me your favorite color,” says the well-dressed woman.

  Nora Swann stares at the wall, at moving pictures painted with light, and then she stares down at her hands. She wonders if maybe she’s going to be sick, after all. “Blue,” she says. “My favorite color is blue.”

  “Any particular shade of blue that you prefer?”

  Nora Swann nods. “I’m pretty sure it’s called Egyptian blue. At home, I have a faience scarab I bought in Cairo. It’s the shade of blue I mean.”

  “And has that been the case as long as you can remember, your affinity for that shade of blue?”

  “Sure,” says Nora Swann, and then she looks from her hands to the bucket, but the queasiness is beginning to pass. At least that’s something. That’s more than she got last time through this same interrogation. And the time before that.

  The well-dressed woman sits staring at the images on the wall for thirty or thirty-five seconds, and then she asks, “At this point, how far did you judge yourself to be from your targets?”

  “Four and a half meters, max,” says Nora Swann. “Fifteen feet, give or take.”

  “And it was your decision to get in that close?”

  “It was.”

  “Your reputation, Nora, is as a sharpshooter. Are you telling me that your briefing did not specify completing your mission from a distance?”

  Nora Swann replies, “No, it didn’t. That was left entirely to my discretion. The usual arrangement. I was ordered to acquire and neutralize the targets within a designated time frame. How was left up to me.” And then, glancing about the cottage, it suddenly occurs to her that she’s alone with the well-dressed woman from Albany. She wasn’t alone when the projector was switched on, she’s sure of that. There was the tech guy, Donncha, and there was the blonde girl named Josie, the girl who’s seen to her wounds, who makes tea, who cooks and runs errands. There were four of them, at the start of the session, only four and not five, because Hugh Papadopoulos, her handler for the last three hits, had been asked by the well-dressed woman to please remain outside the cottage until they were finished. The assassin from Iowa has no idea when Donncha and Josie left; she didn’t hear them go. She looks back at the images on the wall.

  “What year were you first contacted by Albany?” the woman asks her.

  “1992, August 1992.”

  “I didn’t ask for the month, just the year.”

  Standing in that sea of peonies, the albino looks up and directly into the CCTV camera. The girl’s eyes are bright blue and her lips are so pale they have almost no color at all. She lets go of the psychiatrist’s hand and reaches into a pocket of her raincoat. She takes out a folded bit of paper, also blue—the blue of an Egyptian scarab—and holds it up to the camera, so there can be no mistake about what she’s taken from her pocket. It’s an origami swan. She smiles, and then she lowers her arm and looks to her left. Which means she was looking at Nora Swann. Ten seconds pass, fifteen, twenty, twenty-three, twenty-three-point-seven, and then, off camera, there’s a gunshot, then another, and people begin to shout and scream and run. Neither the albino nor the psychiatrist move a muscle. Both remain perfectly still. In that moment, they could almost be statues, those two.

  The image projected on the wall freezes.

  Nora Swann lights another of the stinking menthols, the last one in the pack, and she sits smoking and gazing towards the cottage door. She feels a shiver down her spine, the sort of shiver that her mother always said meant a possum had run across your grave, across the place that would one day be your grave. Nora Swann realizes that her hands are trembling. That’s new. She wonders if Hugh Papadopoulos is standing on the other side of the cottage door or if maybe he’s already on the M7, on his way to Shannon Airport and a flight back to the States.

  The well-dressed woman asks, “Do you know, Nora, why you were deemed valuable to the organization, back in 1992?”

  “I was never told,” answers Nora Swann, and she can hear a tremble in her voice, as well. “I’ve always assumed it was my service record, my technical proficiency, my kill rate. I’ve always assumed it was because I’m good at my job.”

  The well-dressed woman shakes her head, and then she turns around and switches off the projector. At least, thinks Nora Swann, she won’t have to watch the rest of it over again, the part where she draws the Glock and puts a round in her own left shoulder and another in her own right foot. She won’t have to see herself crumple helplessly to the floor of the Dublin fruit and vegetable market. She won’t have to watch herself lying there while the psychiatrist and the albino make their getaway.

  “No,” says the well-dressed woman. “That isn’t why. You see, it’s easy to find people who are good at your job, who are skilled with guns and knives and who show no remorse about killing. Who are loyal and follow orders to the letter. There is never any shortage of those kinds of people.”

  “Fine,” says Nora Swann. “Then why was I hired?”

  “You were hired—that is, we chose you—because your psi aptitude and receptivity scores were very close to zero, lower even than average. You were, as regards psionic ability
, a null variable. The Hieronymus machine hardly seemed aware you were in the room. More importantly, you demonstrated an almost complete lack of vulnerability to concerted psionic attack, of the sort you suffered in Dublin this past Monday, and that is a rare quality, indeed. So, you were deemed ideal for wetwork involving push operatives and TK hostiles. We see now that assessment was sorely mistaken, even if we don’t yet understand entirely how or why the woman in the market was able to do what she did.

  “But that’s why I’m here, to solve the problem so we don’t make the same mistake twice. Now tell me, how old were you the first time you had sex?”

  Nora Swann takes a drag on her cigarette, taps ash on the floor, and then she says, “You need to find her sister.”

  “Her sister? How do you know she has a sister?”

  “How I know doesn’t matter. You need to find her, as soon as you can. She’s much more dangerous, the sister. They’re twins. Identical twins.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this before now?” asks the well-dressed woman, and for the first time since her arrival from Albany, she looks as if maybe she’s not completely in control of the situation. For the first time, Nora Swann can see a shadow of doubt in her hard eyes and at the corners of her hard mouth.

  “I was twelve,” says Nora Swann.

  “Excuse me?” asks the well-dressed woman.

  “The first time I had sex. It was one of my mother’s boyfriends, only I was supposed to call them ‘uncles.’ I consented. It wasn’t rape, except in the legal sense. But you already know all about that. Still, if you’d like to hear it again, if it gets you wet, I’m not going anywhere, am I?”

  And then the well-dressed woman from Albany, she gets up and she walks to the other side of the whitewashed cottage. She stands near the crucifix, takes out her phone, and makes a call. And Nora Swann sits in the metal folding chair and waits for more questions or a bullet to the brain or whatever it is that happens next.