Steal the Lightning

by Tim Lees

  I slowed, looking around.

  A cop stepped out and flagged me down.

  “Got business here, sir?”

  “We’re trying to find a place to eat,” I said.

  I have been told never to lie to cops, but sometimes it’s just easier than telling the truth.

  “Keep going, sir. You can’t stop here.”

  “OK.” I smiled, engagingly, I hoped. “What’s happening with the meeting there? I heard it’s quite a thing?”

  The temperature went down perceptibly.

  “ID,” said the cop.

  I handed him my passport. He flicked to the picture page, glanced from it to me and back again.

  “Your car?”

  “Company car. I have the papers—” I went to open the glove compartment, then stopped myself. “Is it OK . . . ?”

  He nodded. I showed him the papers and he waved them around a little. “Meeting’s closed tonight,” he said. “Weekend, too. Maybe longer. You need to stay away. Clear?”

  “Has something happened here? What’s going on?”

  “Drive straight through. Do not stop.” He handed me the papers, then said, “You want a diner, there’s Millie’s on the highway. Exit 21.”

  He waved us off.

  Angel said, “Meeting’s closed?”

  We circled round towards the park. Now we could see it: cop cars everywhere. There can’t have been this many cops in the whole county, never mind the town. And there were no crowds. No onlookers, no congregation. Like they’d all just vanished into thin air.

  I started to pull over.

  Angel said, “Don’t do that!”

  “I was only going to ask—”

  “Guy told you not to stop, Chris. So don’t stop.”

  I drove on.

  Chapter 31

  Options

  Silverman, we left at his van.

  It was the desk clerk at the Gemini who told us what was happening. She glanced quickly left and right, then, sotto voce, like a gossip spreading scandal, she said, “We got a outbreak.”

  “Outbreak . . . ?”

  “TB. What they used to call ‘consumption.’ Four or five of ’em, up at St. Luke’s, I hear. New guests gotta register with the Sheriff’s office.”

  She was a small, round woman, and like any good gossip, she managed to sound thrilled and horrified, both at the same time.

  “It’s all them crowds. That preacher feller . . .”

  I looked at Angel.

  The desk clerk said, “It was on the news. Local news. I always listen. You sneeze or blow your nose, you should always check the tissue. That’s what they said.” She opened her hand and stared at it. “See any flecks of blood—you get straight to that hospital, OK?” She eyed us warily. “You don’t got flecks of blood, do you?”

  “Our tissues are just fine,” I told her. “Honestly.”

  How do you shut down a whole town?

  Eddie would say, simple: with money.

  And maybe he was right.

  Angel asked, “You going to phone him?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  “You think he did it? Or just knew about it, then claimed credit?”

  “Either way,” she said, “this was coming, way before he offered us a deal. You don’t set stuff like this up in an hour or two.”

  “Dead right.”

  “And it means,” she said, “we get a crack at the pond.”

  “It means we can . . . consider our options, anyway.”

  She watched me. She kept watching me.

  Then my phone rang.

  It was Silverman. “I got a text from the Ballington kid. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It says—” he cleared his throat. “‘Happy birthday, guys. Give it your best. I’ll see you soon.’”

  “‘I’ll see you soon,’” I said.

  That irked me, somehow.

  It wasn’t an immediate thing. But the more I thought about it—that awful, egotistical self-confidence, that absolute belief that all he had to do was hold out a few bucks for everyone to fall in line—the more I thought: I want to do this. If I can. If it’s even possible. I want to make this retrieval just so I can drive away and leave the stupid bugger empty-handed. Fuck him, thinking he can boss the world around. Fuck him.

  Then, out loud, I said, “Fuck him.” It sounded good, and so I rolled it round my mouth, said it again: “Fuck him.”

  I can be childish, sometimes.

  It’s one of my better qualities.

  Chapter 32

  Confession

  We slept a while that afternoon. I had laid it all out, straight: it was my retrieval. She’d help, yes. But she’d do the jobs I asked her, and no more. I told her we’d see how it went. How safe it was.

  We didn’t fight exactly. But it was close, too close.

  “I can do this,” she said.

  “I don’t even know that I can do it.”

  I tried to tell her: I didn’t want the complication, I didn’t want the extra worry.

  I didn’t want to sound like a patronizing oaf, either. But I probably did.

  And that’s the subtle and insidious way that work and personal life intertwine. Retrievals require calm, and focus. No distractions. People get hurt when they can’t keep their minds on the job. One slip, an error they don’t catch in time, or just looking the wrong way at the wrong moment, and that’s it. Suddenly, it’s not a little problem anymore. Suddenly, it’s life or death.

  And there’s another factor, too. Especially when the god’s roused up.

  There is debate on this. Officially, no, the gods cannot “get inside your head.” They cannot winkle out whatever’s bothering you and turn it into some huge, crippling, psychological obsession that will render you helpless, stupefied, or dead. Officially, they can’t do anything like that.

  But they can have a damn good try.

  None of which would have been more than routine problems, if it weren’t for the location.

  In a good retrieval, there’s precision. You place the cables so; you power them up, you play your quarry, drive it, fight it if you have to.

  Water ruins that. Water turns it all to mush.

  Water, generally, is not the place you want to find your god.

  I brought the flask and cables and control box into our motel room. I checked them over. I had Angel check them over. Then we joined the cables into several lengths we thought would span the pond. Another, much longer, to circle it. I used Google Maps to estimate the scale. We made a plan.

  “You get the next one. Honestly,” I said.

  “I better,” she said. And gave me a look I hope I never, never see again.

  Silverman, too, had been preparing. He showed me his night vision gear. “Military issue. It’s what they used in Iraq.” He bounced from foot to foot. “Makes everything look green. But, you know, sometimes, that’s more dramatic, don’t you think?”

  He tipped the monitor so I could see.

  “I’m curious,” I said. “I’d like to know why Eddie sent you that text.”

  “Pretty obvious, I thought. Claiming credit, so we’d think—”

  “Back up a bit. He’s got your phone number. He’s not got mine, he’s not got Angel’s. But somehow, he’s got yours. Why’s that?”

  The silence went on just a bit too long.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “You’ve dealt with him before.”

  “Like I said, the exhibition, and . . . some other stuff.”

  “What ‘other stuff’?”

  “Not him, exactly. One of their companies. And, yeah. His father, just briefly. Ballington . . . senior.” He put the camera down. “I was trying for funding. I mean, these people, they’re, like, stupid rich. You won’t believe. So I thought, since they’re interested . . .”

  “You know Eddie’s dad?”

  “No! I don’t know him. Not kno
w know. But, half this job, half of it’s trying to raise the money. I mean, I tried hundreds, maybe thousands of potential sponsors. I lose track. And he was, you know. He was one of them.”

  “You told him I’d be here.”

  He shuffled his feet. “I, um, might have. I thought, maybe, if he knew there was a Registry presence, he’d take it more seriously. I was, you know, kind of surprised to talk to him, to be honest. That’s rare. And he’s notoriously, ah . . .” he spent a moment looking for the word, “difficult.”

  “He’s a crook,” said Angel.

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “This guy,” she told me, “Eddie Senior, or whatever he is—he’s like the Jeffrey Dahmer of businessmen. Crawled out from under more lawsuits than anybody in America, or so he claims.”

  “Is this true?”

  Silverman nodded.

  “His big trick,” Angel said, “is, you work for him, you do some job—then he tells you he’s not going to pay. Or he’s going to pay you half. Whatever. He’s got money. Means his lawyers can go longer than yours can. Most people just give up.”

  “Charming. And he’s the guy you want to fund you?”

  “He was . . . a possibility,” said Silverman. “But, like I say, he’s kind of difficult.”

  He pretended to adjust his camera settings.

  “You told him that you’d got connections, though? In the Registry.”

  “Um.”

  “And let me guess. Your connections gave you my itinerary. Before they’d even given it to me. And you gave it to Ballington. We getting warm now?”

  “Well.” His feet were doing their very own little soft-shoe shuffle, while the rest of him sat, frozen stiff.

  “It might be worse than that,” he said at last.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I might have implied I was, ah, kind of a colleague. Not in Field Ops, obviously. I mean, I didn’t say it outright. But he, he might have inferred . . . And I might have got you sent here. Can’t say for sure. Might have, ah, suggested—at the Registry—just told them it was, you know. Kind of a thing here.”

  “Kind of a thing.”

  “Um . . . like I could see, you know, the drama. The potential. And . . .”

  “The Registry, and the Ballingtons.”

  “Look,” he said. “It’s tough, being freelance. Trying to make the funding. You’ve got two seconds till they put the phone down, and you just say anything to keep their interest, and . . .”

  “You get the money?”

  “No.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “In fact, till today, I thought they’d just forgotten about it.” He managed a weak smile. “Guess not, huh?”

  Chapter 33

  All in the Prep

  You learn to be practical. You learn to say, fuck it.

  It wasn’t that I needed Silverman. I could have done the job with Angel—I could have done it on my own, if I’d have had to. But another pair of hands would make it quicker, smoother, and I reckoned he took orders well enough.

  I almost cut him loose. I thought about it. Then, like I say: fuck it.

  There wasn’t going to be a whole lot of precision about this one. First the perimeter, then we’d block off the pond, piece by piece. Normally you’d set up a series of concentric rings, and just sort of chase the little bugger into the flask. But water spread the charge. So we’d have to use that, if we could, and take the place in sections. There’d be no prodding and teasing with the thing, no trying to maneuver it into position. Only bam, bam, bam, shutting off one part of the pond after another. The flask at the far end, ready for the god.

  We’d use one of the boats, but the cables would be underwater, and even in the daylight that would have been a problem, trying to get everything in place, not too near, not too far, not crossing over one another. I was wondering—yet again—if it was time to quit the whole idea. Then Silverman said, “Helium balloons.”

  “What?”

  “You want markers, right? So you tie balloons every few feet. Pond’s maybe four or five feet deep. You won’t see the cables, but you’ll see the balloons.”

  I thought about it for a while. It sounded good.

  “You trying to make amends?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m trying to make a movie. You don’t do this, then what’s my movie about?”

  We bought helium balloons.

  In England, I’d have had no idea where to get such things. Here, there was a whole shop full of them. The guy just sat there, filling them up for us. We bought wedding and happy birthday and get well soon. We bought you’re the greatest! and be mine! and hey you! We bought life is like a balloon and choose life and love life and life is what happens while you’re making other plans. We bought sorry and excuse me, I’m an asshole. We bought whoop, we bought big whoop, we bought whoop. We bought no dancing, no fornicating. We bought Honda Seville. We bought kiss me I’m Armenian. We bought St. Pat’s, Bierkeller, Hawaii 5–0. The shopkeeper raised his brows but mostly he was just counting the bucks. Then we prepared the cables just as Silverman had said and went out to the diner and I kept an eye open for Eddie’s limo but it didn’t show.

  Silverman returned to his van. Angel and I went back to our motel bed, staring at the ceiling, holding hands, trying to sleep.

  Of course we couldn’t.

  Chapter 34

  A Gathering of the Faithful

  There was just enough moonlight to see by.

  If you squinted and looked really hard.

  At 2:00 a.m., I drove into the park. We bumped over a curb, onto the grass. I cut the lights and drove across the lawn, then in among the trees. I got close. Then I turned around and backed up till a clump of shrubs got in the way. By then the pond was just a few feet off.

  I said, “Whatever happens, focus on the job. Don’t rush it. Do it right, each step. Check it as you go. Then check it after, all right?”

  Angel gave me a thumbs-up.

  “Your state of mind’s important here. Be quick, but more than that, be accurate. OK?”

  I was aware of Silverman, then, in the backseat, and the little red light on the camera, shining in the gloom.

  “You,” I said, “do what you’re told. And nothing else. All right?”

  The cables gleamed. They pick up light; sometimes they almost seem to glow, all on their own.

  We put the flask on the jetty. We set up the control box, about three yards back from it. Then we ran a line around the pond. That was our perimeter. It went well till we reached the tent. The canvas came right to the water. It was anchored with wooden stakes, and the pond was deep enough for wading not to seem a happy option. I doubled back to get one of the boats from the jetty. It was easy enough. There was a locked gate I had to hop across but it was hardly Fort Knox. I rowed, softly, trying to keep the noise down. It was frustrating; I scarcely seemed to move. But I got there. I used the tent fastenings to hold the cable. Meantime, Angel had the other cables out of the car, balloons bobbing like sunflowers on a breezy day.

  It was then—before we’d even set up—I realized that we weren’t alone.

  I’d ignored a couple of cars that had gone by, and the flash of headlights from between the trees. But now I saw a pickup rumble to a stop across the square. Moments later, another car pulled in beside it. People got out. And down the hill, I saw people walking. All of them heading for the tent.

  “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  I had Silverman and Angel lay low, watching.

  “You think they’re going to do the whole bit? The meeting, pull the curtains back, all that?”

  “They might.”

  But this was clandestine—the very hour said that. No flocks of worshippers, no crowds—and with luck, no one out here, in the dark, keeping watch.

  Ten minutes passed. It felt more like an hour. But there were no more cars. Now everyone was in the tent. There wasn’t going to be a show. This was about something else.

  I said, “He’s p
rotecting his investment.”

  Silverman asked what I meant.

  “The god’s got used to them. Every night, it gets its little fix, its bit of worship. Its psychic energy. He wants to keep it happy. Or his people do. Otherwise, it might just up and leave.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “I doubt it. But I’d guess he doesn’t know that.”

  A dim glow moved over the inside of the tent. Were they using flashlights? What were they doing in there?

  Perhaps it wasn’t even a ceremony. Just a few prayers, maybe a hymn or two . . .

  If we were quick. If we were lucky . . .

  I stood up.

  “If I say stop, we stop. Got that?” I looked at Angel. “Got that?”

  She gave a little, mocking sigh. “You’re always trying to spoil the fun, Chris.”

  There were voices. There was singing. Not the choir this time; a whispered hymn, maybe ten or twenty voices, crooning, low. The perfect soundtrack. I set out in the boat again. I could reach the bottom of the pond with the oar and for a time I pushed the boat along like that, unreeling cables that sank into the water and left a trail of big, shiny balloons gleaming in the moonlight. The water was so smooth and peaceful, and they studded it like pillows on a ballroom floor.

  The singing kept up. When it stopped, I pulled the oars in, and we floated, silent, waiting. As soon as it resumed, then I went on.

  It was nearly 3:00 a.m.

  The moon’s reflection rippled under me. Balloons bobbed. A night breeze rustled in the trees.

  I got back to the jetty. Angel had the last few cables ready for me.

  “Church meeting?” she said.

  “They stay in there, we’re fine. And if they don’t get the thing all roused up again.”

  “There’s enough of them for that?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  I looked around. The moon had sunk behind the treetops, its light broken and dimmed.

  Three cables still to go. Short ones. Quick ones.

  I had changed my mind about the jetty, though. It was not the place to be if things got hot. I told her, “Move the flask back to the bank. We’ll drive the god inshore. Where’s Silverman?”