A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  CHAPTER 9

  Dodging and maneuvering with Jacob through the crowded subway, Caitlin tried hard to shake the odd paranoia that had seized her outside her office, but it was like swallowing an oversized bite of a sandwich. She usually tried to make a game of their dash through rush hour—Crazy Football or Running with the Gazelles—but not today. Jacob was deep in his own thoughts and she just wanted to get home.

  The third-floor hallway seemed unusually quiet, the clang of the keys uncommonly hollow. It reminded her, unpleasantly, of the feeling she’d had at the Pawars’ apartment. A sense that she was somehow in danger. Not Jacob, just her.

  Unlocking the door, she made a mental note to talk to Barbara about this, then happily turned her attention to roasting broccoli and defrosting and heating a container of congee for dinner. Jacob went straight to his room. They had arrived home just in time for his weekly online chat with his father. Caitlin was surprisingly glad for Andy’s call right now; even abnormal normalcy was welcome.

  Andrew Thwaite, divorced with three kids, was a sociologist from Sydney whom Caitlin had met in Thailand three weeks after the 2004 tsunami. He had joined one of her relief efforts, which Ben helped to coordinate through the under-secretary-general of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. When they met, Caitlin felt that he was “right for right now,” as she’d expressed it to Ben.

  “The people I’ve talked to say he’s kind of a d-bag, Cai,” Ben had said.

  “Oh, you checked?”

  “Captain of your team,” he said evasively.

  “Well, he’s smart, he’s entertaining, he isn’t making any promises to be something he’s not, and he’s six-three and ripped.”

  “Uh-huh. I know the type, a swaggering narcissist.”

  “Strong words, Ben.”

  “I’ve been living in the shadow of miserable hotshots like him my whole life. He’ll use you and leave you in the dust.”

  “Only after I leave him in mine. Hey, is this about me or you, Ben?”

  “Fair enough,” he conceded, “but I think you’ve entirely misunderstood the meaning of ‘relief efforts.’ ”

  The disagreement ended in laughter. But after passion trumped caution and she found out she was pregnant, she decided to keep the child. Andy was notified and had stayed far away, making everything blessedly simple.

  Until recently.

  Around the time Andy’s youngest kid went to college, in 2011, he’d suddenly asked for weekly video calls with Jacob. She had no objection to that. She and Jacob had discussed it repeatedly and Jacob seemed happy to accept him on the same level as an upstairs neighbor. But six months ago Andy had asked Caitlin why she hadn’t chosen a cochlear implant operation for Jacob when he was younger.

  “Because it’s Jacob’s choice,” she said.

  “Jacob is ten,” Andy pointed out. “The earlier the operation is performed, the easier the learning curve—”

  “Having to work a little harder is a fair price for his freedom of choice.”

  “I don’t think that’s a choice a fifth grader should be allowed to make.”

  At that point Caitlin had descended with Thor’s hammer. Under no circumstances was Andy to have that conversation with her child. She delivered the message in a mode that had cowed recalcitrant bureaucrats around the world, and it seemed to work on Andy.

  Still, Caitlin always checked Jacob when he came back from their video chats for signs that he’d had an uncomfortable conversation with his father. There were none today; he moved right along from a question about whether kids rode kangaroos in the outback to the topic of his homework, an opinion essay on the ethics of zoos.

  As they discussed the different sides of the zoo issue, the back of Caitlin’s mind was chewing over her own ethical dilemma: sending the video of Maanik’s hypnosis session to Ben. She had already received his secure e-mail address, and she already knew she was going to send the file to him, despite it being against the rules of doctor-patient confidentiality. She concluded that because Ben was a friend of the family there was a chance the Pawars would agree if she asked—but she needed more certainty than just a chance. Sharing it with anyone other than Ben would be indefensible, yet she needed an outsider’s perspective, confirmation of something she had begun wondering about, something she couldn’t be sure was true. A full understanding of Maanik’s very elusive inner world depended on this.

  • • •

  After dinner, when she and Jacob had finished washing the dishes, Caitlin sent Ben the file, then called him online. When his image appeared he was looking at something else on the screen and typing, and she could tell he was beat.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “For horses,” she replied.

  He smirked. It wasn’t funny, but Caitlin was. They were. That had always been their way: when one was down the other always took the high, droll road to help out.

  “It’s taking this long to download?” she asked.

  “It’s getting here ‘bit by bit,’ ” he joked back.

  “Yikes. Is the UN giving employees hand-me-down computers from 1995?”

  “Clay and styluses.” He smiled. “I’m using the landline to download the file, plus I’m jumping it through a few other hoops. Extra protections.” He finally glanced at her. “I’m surprised you sent it, Cai.”

  “It wasn’t an easy decision but desperate minds call for desperate measures.”

  “Are you feeling desperate?”

  “I meant Maanik’s mind.” She thought for a moment. “No, I’m not desperate. Yet.”

  Ben glanced away, somber. Then he fixed on her again. “How are you feeling?”

  “About what?” she said, hedging.

  “Managing this in the epicenter of a world crisis.”

  “I think we’re all in that epicenter,” she said. “Any progress there?”

  He shook his head. “You avoided the question.”

  Now it was Caitlin who looked away. What she wanted to say was, Honestly, I’m not myself and I don’t know why. But this call was not about her.

  “I’m very, very concentrated,” she said. “Sharp as a knife.”

  “Don’t lose yourself in this, Cai.”

  “I won’t. I know how to work my switchboard pretty well.” She smiled.

  “ ‘Switchboard,’ ” he muttered. “You realize we may be the last generation who knows what that means? I had to translate ‘VCR’ for a young observer from Bhutan today. They had no idea what I was talking about.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she teased.

  “Nice.” He grinned. “You got any new ‘someone walks into a bar’ jokes?”

  Caitlin laughed and shook her head. “Those were the worst jokes ever,” she said apologetically.

  “That’s what made them so good. My all-time favorite? Ahem—‘A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a gin and tonic. And a mop.’ ”

  “I worry about you, Ben.” She rolled her eyes. “And no. I kind of outsourced the bulk of my sense of humor to Jacob a long time ago. He’s got natural silliness and it’s more than enough for one household.”

  Ben shook his head. There was an imperceptibly longer, perceptibly more awkward silence. “What about the other parts of your life? Are you seeing anybody?”

  “No. And why do we always have to have this conversation?”

  “Not always—”

  “You’re like my mother,” she went on. “Or more accurately, my sister, who’s due to gently kick me in the ass about that any day now, so I don’t need it from you too.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I wasn’t gonna kick you.”

  They looked at each other. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to go off on you. Just a little stressed. Won’t happen again.”

  “Great. Anyhow, the video’s downloa
ded. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Caitlin didn’t miss the quick change of topic but filed the observation away for later.

  Ben opened the video and tucked it in the corner of the chat window so they could both watch.

  “Jeez,” he said when Maanik started speaking in gibberish.

  “I know.”

  “Wow,” he said again at the moment in the hypnosis when Caitlin felt she had been thrown into a wall. “What happened there?”

  Caitlin didn’t answer so that he could focus on the use of the “blackberries” cue. She wanted him to know the cue in case the ambassador asked about it, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d shared the video.

  At the end of the video Ben ran it back again to the segment with Maanik’s gibberish. Then they watched it a third time.

  “You think that could be a language?” she asked.

  Ben made a noncommittal sound and paused the video. He sat back, thinking. “There’s a clipped similarity to Japanese in it,” he mused.

  “I thought that too.”

  “Right there,” he said, and rewound the segment again. “You hear that?”

  Maanik was saying, “Thyodularasi.”

  “Yes . . . ?” Caitlin said.

  “That’s a distinctly Asiatic ‘r,’ ” Ben told her.

  “It’s prevalent throughout,” Caitlin said. “That’s what makes the whole thing sound like Japanese, right?”

  “That’s part of it, along with the alveolar stops on the ‘d’s and ‘t’s. But at the beginning of that word, that’s a very hard ‘th.’ Those sounds don’t coexist in any language.”

  “Not anywhere?”

  “Well, we don’t have every tribal language on the planet down, but as a rule that ‘r’ and that ‘th’ don’t evolve in the same tongue.”

  The video flicked off and the screen reverted to just Ben, who was rubbing his eyes.

  “Pretty amazing, right?” she said.

  “What the hell is going on with that girl?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, if the Pawars will let me.”

  “Hold on, Caitlin. All you have to worry about is getting them through this period of the negotiations.”

  “What?” She felt as though she’d been head-butted.

  “That’s why I brought you in,” he reminded her. “There are teams of people who can help once the ambassador doesn’t have to worry about the media.”

  “I understand that, but I’m not—I mean, I don’t just want to be some stopgap.”

  “Cai, I didn’t mean that—I meant that this isn’t in my control. I suspect they’ll take her back to India as soon as we’re clear of all the political barbed wire.”

  “And what about Maanik? Ben, something is happening to that girl. I’m not just going to spackle her.”

  “I wasn’t implying that,” he said defensively. “Look, we’re both tired and I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’ll back your play, whatever it is. I just know how you get when you’re invested in a case, so keep a distance, okay?”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  He smiled. “A small distance. For your own mental well-being.”

  “A small distance,” she agreed, and forced herself to smile back.

  “And now I’m going to put myself to bed,” he said. “We’ll see what my subconscious has to say about all this.”

  “Is that all you’ve got?” she teased.

  “I’m not a university go-getter anymore,” he said. “Those days ain’t comin’ back.”

  Caitlin hid her disappointment. She’d shared the video with him so they could discuss that last part of the hypnosis, the wall moment. But the man needed rest before going back to the peace table.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night, Cai,” he said, and raised a hand with effort as he signed off.

  She raised a hand at the dark screen.

  After answering a few e-mails and reading a few headlines in the professional newsletters, she went to say good night to Jacob. He was buzzing with energy and Caitlin had to sign “good night” to him so many times, curving her right hand over her left hand to say, “Night, night, night!” that she felt like a robot—so she walked stiff-legged, arms outstretched like the Frankenstein monster, toward the door. Many giggles later, Jacob finally drifted into silence.

  Amazingly, Caitlin too managed to fall asleep at a decent time. But just a few hours later, she woke in a panic, feeling like she was clawing upward through blankets. The sign for “night” was stuck on a loop in her head like a song refrain, along with an old memory of Jacob trying to coach her signing.

  “Mommy, it’s in your elbows, fix your elbows!”

  Damn it, Caitlin thought as three o’clock became four o’clock. Why were elbows stuck in her brain? It had to be Maanik.

  She got out of bed and turned on her tablet, booted the video of Maanik. She watched it from the moment the girl began speaking gibberish. Caitlin’s spine straightened and her brain woke up. There was a definite change to how the girl’s elbows were moving. After several viewings she was certain that they were inscribing specific arcs at specific times. Maanik was repeating some of the gestures, which suggested they had meaning—and might indicate that the gibberish had meaning too.

  Caitlin took a deep breath, trying not to get overly excited. But she felt that she had just made a major breakthrough in this case. And if that were true, it might be possible to guide Maanik out of the morass sooner than she’d thought.

  CHAPTER 10

  Montevideo, Uruguay

  Heading from Port Stanley toward its first refueling stop in Montevideo, Uruguay, the Learjet Bombardier cut gracefully through the dawn sky like a white arrow.

  Mikel Jasso—born in Pamplona, educated at Harvard, elite member of the Group—was the aircraft’s sole passenger. He had begun the two-thousand-mile journey alone with his thoughts, his camera case, and a celebratory glass of Royal Salute scotch—a tradition after every successful mission. The Group routinely monitored that large southern swath of the hemisphere, and in ten years Mikel had successfully retrieved all eight of the relics they had instructed him to acquire. The relics came from museums, scientific research ships, military vessels, and tourists. This time the quest had begun four days earlier, when they intercepted a cell phone message from a Dr. Story to a colleague at Oxford. Jasso had been dispatched to the Falklands immediately by private jet. He had booked a room at the Malvina House Hotel, waited for the Captain Fallow to arrive, talked to the crew, studied plans the Group had obtained from contacts at the admiralty, and made his move the next night.

  As heists go, this one had been relatively effortless. Jasso knew that daytime on the vessel was used for repairs and provisioning, after which most of the crew went ashore. The watch at night was lax: no one, neither thief nor stowaway, had reason to board a geological survey ship that was about to head back into the cold, unwelcoming Southern Atlantic.

  There had been no problem finding Dr. Story’s cabin. Jasso had taken care to stay on the port side, where there was no moonlight and the shadows were long and deep. If he had been caught, that too would have been easily taken care of. Jasso was publicly, aggressively opposed to drilling in these waters in general and on the Patagonian Shelf in particular. It was a useful cover story for a man who spent so much time on Group business in that region, from the Humboldt Plain in South America to the Agulhas Plateau in Africa. If he had been detained by seamen or law enforcement, he would have claimed that Falkland Advanced Petroleum was not only harming the environment, they were recklessly destroying submerged historical treasures. The company would have wanted nothing more than to be rid of him. At worst, he would have had to turn over the relic. It would have ended up in a local museum from which, one day, it would disappear.

  But he had not been caught
. The artifact was his.

  As soon as the jet was airborne, Jasso set his tablet on the table beside his scotch and established a Skype connection to New York. In less than fifteen seconds the thin face of Chairwoman Flora Davies filled the screen. Her eyes were alert, expectant. She smiled when she saw Jasso’s grin.

  “You did it.”

  He raised the glass to himself.

  “Show me,” she said. “Please.”

  Jasso hefted the camera case to his lap and opened it. He removed a pair of rubber gloves, slipped them on, and withdrew the swaddled artifact. He placed the face of it in front of the red eye of the camera. Though it was probably just the glow of the computer screen, the object seemed luminescent.

  “It’s a symbol,” she said.

  “It appears so,” Jasso agreed. “Something I’ve never seen.”

  “Nor I. It’s beautiful,” the woman remarked, leaning forward. “Turn it around.”

  Carefully rotating the object, he showed her the reverse side. Seeing the markings facing him, in the dark, they really did have an inner radiance of their own.

  “The finger of God,” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Jehovah on Sinai, writing the tablets,” he said. “I was just thinking—­the markings are still visible even away from the light.”

  “That’s the metal content reflecting ambient light, I would suppose.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I’ll bet this is what the tablets of law may have looked like to Moses after they were cut from the rock.”

  She smiled. “A theological side, Mr. Jasso? You?”

  “I’d describe it as more poetic,” he said.

  “Either applies,” she said.

  Jasso did not disagree. He was not a religious man. He believed in the aspirational power of human beings, not in the interference of gods and demigods. Still, the impact of religion and mythology on what every civilization dreamed of and strived for could not be ignored.