Pastor Rudy said, “Do you come from a Christian background, or…” He nodded to Hootan. “Muslim, maybe?”
Hootan said, “We’re here for the drug you gave Luke.” Across the room, Dr. G laughed. So much for playing along. Perhaps Hootan was incapable of ironic banter.
Pastor Rudy frowned in confusion, or at least an impersonation of it. “I’m not sure what he told you, but—”
“I told them, there’s no drug.” Luke said.
Dr. Gloria had reached the doorway at the back of the room. She glanced in, then nodded to me.
“You mind if I look around?” I asked.
Pastor Rudy glanced at Hootan. The kid kept his hand in his front pocket, calling attention to a Bulge of Significance. “I can give you a tour,” the pastor said.
“Nah, that’s okay,” I said. “Why don’t you just take a seat out here? That okay with you, Hootan?”
I didn’t wait for an answer and walked toward the back doorway that Rudy had stepped out from. Dr. Gloria waited there, wings half-unfurled. The doorway opened to a large space that used to be the store’s warehouse. Heavy steel shelving units sat empty except for a few cardboard boxes, a selection of power tools, and building materials: plywood, paint cans, stacks of drywall. Two big doors at the back of the space looked like they led to a loading dock. There were two other smaller doors along a side wall.
“Where do you want to start searching?” Dr. G asked.
“We could split up,” I said.
“Very funny.” She flipped an imaginary gold coin and caught it in her palm. “Heads, that’s the warehouse.”
“I’m checking the side rooms,” I said.
Dr. G sighed. “You don’t have to keep proving you have free will.”
One of the small doors opened to an office. The room was empty except for a metal desk and filing cabinet, a futon covered by a bedsheet, a couple folding chairs like those in the front room. Bars guarded the single window. No other exits.
On the walls hung three brightly colored posters under Plexiglas. They looked like extreme close-ups of plants, or machinery: gleaming tubes that could have been roots; wet silvery blobs like mercurial seed pods; broad swathes of orange and red and yellow that suggested the skin of tropical flowers. Where was the “Footprints in the Sand” poster? Hell, even a crucifix?
The only liturgical supplies were crowded together on top of the filing cabinet: a pair of wooden offering plates; a box of white communion wafers; a two-liter bottle of chianti, half gone; and a sleeve of plastic shot cups. I opened the wafer box, crushed one of the squares, and sniffed. Nothing. I popped another of the wafers into my mouth.
“You don’t know what’s in that,” Dr. G said.
“The body of Christ,” I said. “As dry as ever.” I didn’t detect a psychotropic hit. I unscrewed the wine bottle and inhaled. It smelled like … cheap wine. I thought about taking a swig, but I knew where that would lead, and did I really want to end my sobriety (and it would end, it always ended) on Costco Kool-Aid?
On the desk lay a ten-inch tablet and a separate keyboard. I swiped the tablet’s screen, and it opened to a music player, the cursor paused a couple minutes into something called “Gary Gygax Attax.”
“Smell that?” Dr. G asked.
I looked up. Caught a faint tang of ammonia, and then it was gone. “Someone’s been printing,” I said.
I began opening desk drawers. One was locked, but it was too narrow to hold what I was looking for. I went through each drawer of the filing cabinet, looking for stacks of rice paper, or at least printing supplies. I found nothing but ordinary paper, file folders, tangled computer cables.
Hootan yelled from the front room, “What’s taking so long?”
“Shut up,” I yelled back.
I walked out of the office. Caught another whiff of amines. I started for the warehouse, then stopped, turned toward the other small door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open and flipped on the light, expecting a scattering of cockroaches. It was a bathroom, newly renovated and sparkling clean: white tile, new toilet, a shower stall guarded by a white rubber curtain. I pulled back the curtain.
“Here we go,” Dr. G said, excited.
A new-looking chemjet printer sat on a wire crate positioned in the center of the shower stall. The printer’s exhaust fan and runoff port had been covered by an elegant filter and valve system. Plastic tubes snaked down into the shower drain. In the corner of the stall was an open FedEx box agleam with foil c-packs. Many of them were labeled with the hexagonal sperm symbol of phenethylamine, the yeast of artisanal drug manufacturing.
The chemjet wasn’t a model I recognized. Most of these machines were made in China or Malaysia and stamped with generic-sounding names like “Print Pro,” but this one had no markings that I could see. And those valves were a cut above the usual hobbyist price point.
The printer wasn’t turned on, so I thought it safe to pop the lid. It was like opening the hood of a Chrysler K-car and discovering a Ferrari engine. No, an art project. I recognized many of the components—copper tubes, mini-ovens (each costing thousands of dollars apiece), ceramic refrigeration coils, glass reaction chambers—but others were a mystery to me. Tubes and wires crossed and recrossed in a web that reminded me of neurons, or those graphs showing every possible relation in a social network.
This was like no chemjet I’d ever seen. A normal printer was designed to cook multiple recipes within a certain range, like a home bread maker. No reaction chamber connected directly to another, because you might have to plug in other steps—for drying, mixing, or distilling—to make whatever drug you programmed.
But this engine was so convoluted, so complicated, I knew I didn’t have the skills to take it apart and put it back together to see how it worked. The best I could hope for was a kind of brain scan: watch it in action and try to figure out what was happening.
“Why does this look familiar?” Dr. G asked.
“No idea,” I said. “But this thing makes Numinous, I’m sure of it. We have to take it with us.”
“We can’t just walk out with it,” Dr. G said. “Fayza would never let us keep it.”
The angel had a point. I snapped the lid back in place and closed the rubber curtain. I walked out of the bathroom, then back in.
Dr. G said, “We need—”
“A decoy,” I said.
I jogged back to the office and grabbed the box of communion wafers.
In the front room, Pastor Rudy and Luke sat on the seats—the pastor relaxed, Luke anxious—while Hootan paced in front of them, still holding his hand in his front pocket.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked him.
“What?” Hootan asked.
“The hand thing. Either show them the gun or not. What’s the deal with hiding it, but letting everyone know you’re hiding it?”
Hootan resentfully removed his hand from his pouch, sans gun. He looked at the box in my hand. “Did you find it?”
“I have to test it, but I’m ninety percent sure the pastor here is delivering it through these.”
“Crackers?”
Oh, right. Muslim. “Communion wafers,” I said. “The powder form of the drug mixes easily with unleavened bread.”
Luke looked surprised. Pastor Rudy seemed calm. “You’re welcome to them,” he said to me.
“If you’re wrong—,” Hootan said.
“Then we come back and bust up the joint. Or whatever it is gangsters do.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Dr. G said.
Luke said to the pastor, “You’re not just going to let them walk out of here?”
Rudy patted the man’s arm. “Everything works out, Luke.” He looked at me. “Vaya con dios.”
“Like I have any choice,” I said.
* * *
Hootan, his mission accomplished now, dropped me off at Bobby’s apartment. It worried me that I didn’t have to give him directions.
Before I went in the building, I used the flip pho
ne Fayza had given me to call the hospital. I had to speak my way through half a dozen options until the patient phone rang on the NAT ward. If you’re looking for the last pay phones in North America, they’re all located in psych wards.
A female voice answered. “Hello?”
“Put Olivia Skarsten on the line, please,” I said.
The woman said, “Who?”
I finally recognized the voice as belonging to Alexandra, a Korean college student who’d subsisted for four years on a diet of pita chips and intelligence enhancers, until she began to see Manitous residing in furniture. “I want Ollie, damn it. It’s me, Lyda.”
“Oh!” Then: “Are you calling from your room?”
“Alexandra, I left three days ago.”
“Right.” She set down the phone. I could hear the tinny roar of the open line, then Alexandra yelling for Ollie in the distance. Minutes passed while I paced Bobby’s tiny apartment. I just hoped Alexandra remembered to lead Ollie to the phone. Separating the wall appliance from wall was an exercise in object differentiation that Ollie was not prepared to execute.
“Hello?” It was Ollie.
“Hey,” I said.
“Lyda.” She had no problem recognizing voices. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“So the pellet’s working?”
“I’m clean as a whistle. This is something else. I need your help.”
“You’re in trouble.”
“If I’m going to stay out of trouble, I need you.”
She knew what that meant. Not the “you” under medication. The old Ollie.
“You want me to ride without a helmet,” she said.
“Just for a little while.”
The line went silent.
“I’m not going to be very sharp for a while,” she said finally. “And then when the meds wear off … it’s going to be the whole package.”
“I figured.” With Ollie’s particular damage, there was no happy medium for medication. The minimum dose was pretty much the debilitating dose. She was on or decidedly off.
After a moment I said, “So when do you think…?”
I listened to Ollie breathe for thirty seconds, a minute. Mulling it over. Finally she said, “How about tomorrow morning?”
“You can get out by then?”
“It’s not Fort Knox.”
THE PARABLE OF
the Ticking Clock
In those days, after the fall of the towers and the bombing of the trains and the wars in desert cities, after the chemical attacks of New Delhi and the Arab Spring chilled into the Autumn of the Iron Boot, the woman Olivia Skarsten left her post in the United States Army and became a communications analyst for Calasys, Inc., one of the hundreds of private corporations serving the signals intelligence needs of the American empire. She served her company, and her country, very well, and served them even better when she began using Clarity, a certain designer drug that was all the rage in the spook set. She might have served for longer if it had not been for the Case of the Broken Watch.
One of the subjects on the monitor list that Olivia was responsible for was a Pakistani expatriate living in New York City. The man—let’s call him Akbar—had been added to that list because of family relations: Two cousins were known members of the LeT, a Pakistani extremist group that longed to strike a blow against India and its allies. One day Akbar made an internet voice call to his brother-in-law back home in Lahore—let’s call him Bashir, for alphabetical simplicity. Akbar in New York mentioned several times that he wanted to buy a luxury wristwatch. Specifically a Maurice Lacroix wristwatch. Could Bashir the brother-in-law help him?
Olivia the Analyst was curious about this exchange. She had been monitoring cell phone calls, VoIP transmissions, and email for over five years, and she had developed an instinct for the unusual. When she was using Clarity, her powers of pattern recognition were especially keen, and that included recognizing items that were not part of the pattern. She wondered, why would Akbar go to all this trouble to purchase from a relative in Pakistan? Akbar could buy any designer watch he wanted online. Or if he wanted a knockoff, the streets of New York were full of them. Even if Bashir got some fabulous wholesale discount, Olivia categorized the interaction to be—to use a term of art in her field—“fishy.”
She issued a tracking order on Bashir’s communications, and learned that a day after talking to Akbar, Bashir sent an email to an electronics store and asked about an invoice for a shipment of watches. Olivia noticed that the last three digits of the invoice corresponded to the number of a Virgin-Atlantic flight from London to Newark.
Yes, she simply noticed. At this point in her career and chemical cycle, she was firing on all cylinders. The numbers, in a bit of Clarity-induced synesthesia, rang like chimes. Only a few weeks before, on a different matter entirely, she had looked through a list of flights to Newark and New York, and the numbers had stuck in her head.
Olivia, growing nervous now, began to comb through the NSA’s data warehouse for all the signal traffic between Pakistani nationals. She ran queries on all the cleartext available, be it human-translated, autotranslated, or untranslated. In very little time she turned up forty-two conversations—forty-two!—between Pakistanis that mentioned watches, all in the last month. Flight numbers kept appearing in the conversations: a United flight from Pittsburgh, a Lufthansa flight from Munich. Olivia realized that they were trying to decide on a target.
Time was of the essence. She flagged all the relevant data and wrote an alert memo, which she sent, per protocol, to her superior. Unfortunately, this was Memorial Day weekend, and the superior was out of his office, and Olivia could not get any response from his backup. Olivia was upset. It was clearly specified in the operations manual that the team coordinator or his backup was to be available 24-7. While she was fuming, a new cell call popped up from Akbar, her ex-pat Pakistani in NYC, to Bashir in Lahore. Olivia was listening to it live. Near the end of the call, Bashir read off the same London invoice number that Olivia had intercepted before.
Olivia knew that flight. She also knew that it was already in the air. The plane would touch down in New York at 4:52 a.m. Then Bashir said, “You can expect delivery by morning.”
Olivia was not even scheduled to be on duty that night. But she was the only person who could have recognized this pattern.
She tried to call her superior on vacation, but it was 3 a.m. and the call went unanswered. She escalated and called his boss, who curtly told her to file a report for review in the morning. She called the company president and got only so far as his voicemail. Olivia would not quit. She began to call other government offices, ringing pens and cell phones and landlines all over the District of Columbia and Virginia. Of the people she reached, most had never gotten a direct call from a consultant before and refused to talk to her. She finally reached Willa Frank, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, number three at the State Department.
Ms. Frank asked Olivia to slow down and repeat the information. Then she asked for Olivia’s name again, and what company she worked for. Then Ms. Frank said, “How long have you been awake, Ms. Skarsten?”
Olivia wasn’t quite sure. Three days, more or less.
Ms. Frank said, “I’ll take care of this.”
It was now an hour until the plane landed. Olivia was alone in the building, sitting at her desk with all four computer monitors on. One window showed the Virgin-Atlantic website, a dozen others were open to every TV and web news channel Olivia could think of. She was sick to her stomach. Sweat painted her back. She counted down the minutes to 4:52 a.m. And then, at 4:40, the Virgin-Atlantic website updated. The plane had landed early.
Olivia was shocked, but also relieved. No crash. No bomb. She could not understand what had happened. And then, because she was one of the company’s best analysts, she came upon the solution.
Olivia’s superior returned early from vacation and found her at her desk, staring at the monitors. Three se
curity officers stood behind him. The boss said, “Ollie, did you call Willa Frank this morning?”
Olivia said, “Nobody else would listen.”
He told her to gather her personal belongings, but she had already packed the box. She’d been doing fifty milligrams of Clarity a day, plus another fifty of Adderall, and usually a twelve-pack of Red Bull. She could see, almost literally, what was coming. The writing was on the wall, the floors, and the furniture. Each face like an arrow pointing her toward the exit.
A few years later, when she told the story to Lyda Rose, a fellow resident of the neuro-atypical ward of Guelph Western Hospital, Lyda asked, “What happened to the Pakistani guy in New York?”
Ollie shrugged. “He probably got a new watch.”
—G.I.E.D.
CHAPTER SIX
We waited for Ollie at the agreed-upon place, the parking lot of a Tim Hortons three blocks from the hospital. Bobby drumming his fingers on the wheel, Dr. Gloria in the backseat humming Mozart, both of them driving me crazy.
Bobby said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Is what a good idea?” I asked.
“Helping her … escape.”
“You think she’s dangerous?”
“No, no! I mean, maybe. Didn’t she kill a guy?”
“She shot someone. Wounded him. It was a robber who was breaking into her apartment.”
“I thought it was her landlord.”
“Who told you that?”
Bobby touched the treasure chest at his neck. “Todd.”
Fucking Counselor Todd. “Yes,” I said, “but she thought it was a robber.” Actually, she had thought it was an agent sent by her former employers to take her back across the border. Ollie on meds was brain-damaged—couldn’t organize her visual field, couldn’t separate figure from ground, couldn’t recognize her own face in a mirror—but Ollie off meds …
“She can be a little paranoid,” I said.
“She told me that the US has drones the size of house flies, and that they can come in your house and take pictures of you.”
“The US government does not want to see you naked, Bobby.”
Afterparty Page 6
