by John Shirley
“Some,” he allowed grudgingly. “My dad works in it and I picked some stuff up, sort of.”
Lacey handed him one of the little devices they’d found in the envelopes. “Know what that is? It’s a little local mystery—to me anyway. Hundreds of them are being delivered to houses around here.”
He balanced the little hemisphere in his hand, turned it over. “Weird. No . . . not exactly. I mean, this little round part here—you can see the wire going in this hole here—it looks like a transmitter. The whole thing looks like it’s supposed to be on something bigger, maybe.”
“They came in these envelopes.” Lacey showed him one of the envelopes. “They look sort of fake.”
He looked at them and said seriously, “Could be a mind-control device.”
Adair rolled her eyes. “God, Waylon, come on. Not everything is a conspiracy.”
“How come they’re being passed around in this bogus envelope by the hundreds, then?”
Adair took the thing in her hand, and her expression changed as she looked at it. “Acually, I’ve seen one of these before. I think . . . my dad had one. In the garage. He was connecting it to something else.”
Lacey raised her eyebrows. “Well, then, let’s just go ask him.”
“No!”
They all jumped a little in their seats, surprised by Adair’s vehemence.
She went on, looking out the window, “I can’t talk to them. I’m scared to.”
Lacey nodded as if she understood.
Waylon spoke up suddenly. “Something weird is getting broadcast around here. You want to hear it? My mom’s not home, she’s . . . out today. The house is, like, sort of fu—sort of a mess. But if you don’t mind . . .”
Bert and Lacey and Adair were standing behind Waylon, in his moderately malodorous room—he’d hastily cleared a path through the dirty clothes on the floor—and looking over his shoulder as he worked what he called the classified frequencies scanner. It looked to Bert like a sort of ham radio that Waylon had wired into his computer’s hard drive. Waylon tapped the computer’s keyboard to search for “anomalous frequency transmissions.” They passed through what was clearly some kind of jargon-heavy military band, through a lot of crackle and dimly heard nattering, and then to a bandwidth that seemed to leap out as if it came from right next door.
“This is totally not a legal band, here,” Waylon said. “And this is the one I’ve been trying to figure out. Near as I can make out, it’s from here in town.”
The voices coming from the speakers overlapped in a cacophony of cryptic relayings of numbers and apparently encoded phrases. “One-oh-one-oh-one-one-oh-oh-one. Protocol 7655, an outer representative. Emergency conversion at 76 Meriwether Street. Hilltop Mall, basically ours. A new shipment prepared, seek Cluster approval, All of Us 6777777 priority . . . reset H. Robins . . .”
“What the hell,” Bert breathed.
“You see?” Waylon said.
“Who do we talk to about this?” Bert said, turning to Lacey.
“It’s all so . . . ambiguous,” she said. “I’m going to hold off a few days and just gather information. Carefully.”
Adair nodded. “I don’t know how to explain how I know—but it has to be careful.”
“You and Waylon, can you help me with this?”
Adair grinned. “Totally!”
Waylon scowled. “I’ve got my own plans to expose this stuff.”
Lacey smiled at him. “Think I’m going to scoop you? Tell you what, we’ll share a byline. But if there’s anything going on that’s as secret as this seems to be, then it means, maybe, that someone’s being hurt, or endangered—otherwise why hide it? So we have a moral imperative, Waylon, if you know what I mean. Only, let’s wait till we have something concrete.”
Waylon turned to listen to the radio. “Listen to that shit, dude. Listen to that. And tell me I’m just paranoid.”
December 8, evening
Stanner waited for his daughter on Pier 39, in San Francisco, “at the seals.” Just about dinnertime. So far, it was dinnertime for the seals and not for him.
A chill wind off the bay made him zip up his windbreaker. He leaned against the rail, trying to find a spot without gull droppings. Behind him were the shops, the noise of the tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. In front of him, the hissing sea, sporting some white-caps now.
Shannon had wanted to see the seals. She was into nature. She had Sierra Club calendars at her desk at work, he’d noticed, when he’d gone to visit her there, in Chicago. Were these seals or sea lions he was looking at? He thought, looking at them squirm and bark and loll, that these were sea lions. He’d heard the animals had made these rocks home over the last few years, taking over a little corner of an inlet off San Francisco Bay, right near the pier.
The beeper on his hip vibrated, and he looked at the number. Bentwaters’s SRI office. Stanner had scrupulously avoided getting back to them. But maybe he’d better talk to Bentwaters.
He looked around for Shannon, didn’t see her. So he took out his cell phone and called.
“Yeah,” Stanner said, when Bentwaters answered. “What’s up?”
“Stanner? You haven’t been returning our calls.”
Stanner hesitated. Should he speak freely? It might be used against him. He decided to take the plunge. “Last message I got said I should blow off the investigation. I’m not going to do that yet— and I don’t want to be in the position of having to refuse to take orders. You don’t outrank me—so I can talk to you.”
“If you’re smart, you won’t go back to that town. The Facility doesn’t know what to do about it, Stanner. There’s a kind of paralysis of disagreement.”
“So they’re convinced it’s spreading?”
“Yeah. They’ve sent a few people through. They’ve found a frequency being used for a certain level of communication between the cluster and the breakouts.”
“How far’s it gone? I can’t tell, short of holding some guy down and cutting him open.”
“You were right, they can’t do everyone just overnight. They have to create the microinterfaces, and that takes time. So they’re doing some neighborhoods faster than others. Apparently they’re experimenting with animals, and combinations, and they’re using them to control the perimeter. Pretty soon they’ll seal it off completely. So what can you hope to accomplish? You may as well come in from the goddamned cold.”
“I’ll tell you what, I think that town can be saved. Listen, you remember the blanking system we were working on?”
“That takes access to a huge in-place transmission system, or a hydrogen bomb or something, to generate a pulse big enough—”
“No, listen, dammit. There might be an infrastructure, an in-place system we can access, if you can get me a design for an EMP booster that could be hooked into a microwave transmitter. It has to be based on the design the Facility has—the one we modeled.”
“I don’t know.”
“I could test it. We might just be able to save the rest of the town before they go to the next phase. They seem to be able to convert some people easier than others, and if they just make people disappear, it causes too much of a stir. So they’re doing it bit by bit. It gives us a little time, Bentwaters.”
“Why some people and not others?”
“I don’t know. But I found a house where I was sure of the parents; they’re building a transmitter only the All of Us would use. But I’m pretty sure the kids aren’t converted yet. Parents are often converted but the kids left alone—at least at first. It depends on the kid, seems like. For one thing, young people seem to be generally resistant—maybe neurological, maybe psychological, maybe, maybe growth hormones, who knows? I mean, there are some neurological systems that don’t work. We knew that about cats, for example, but we’re not sure why. This resistance principle could be extended, too. We could work up some kind of injection to give people. But in the meantime we have to stop this before it gets—”
“Hi, Dad.”<
br />
Stanner almost dropped the cell phone into the bay when Shannon walked up and leaned on the rail beside him. “Bentwaters, I have to go. I’ll . . . think about being in touch.” He hung up and turned the cell phone off.
His daughter wore a pinstriped suit dress and coat. She was petite, like her mom. Half Japanese.
“Stop what before it gets where, Dad? That sounded like one of your more sinister phone calls.”
“Oh, stop what? Stop women from becoming high-ranking officers.”
“Dad!”
“Kidding, I’m kidding. No, stop my having to do any more paperwork. So, hi. You know what, I think those are probably sea lions and not seals.”
“Hi,” she said, still looking at the sea lions. “Yeah, sea lions.”
She barely looked at him as she spoke. He could tell it was going to be one of those meetings. She was brooding about her mom’s suicide again, maybe.
“So what brought you through town?” he asked.
“What brought you through?” she countered. “Or are you not allowed to say, double-oh-ten-thousand?”
When she’d been a teenager, she’d found out he was Air Force intelligence. He was a spook, and she related that jokingly to James Bond, who was some kind of naval commander as well as a spy, and he’d said, “Well, I’m not double-oh-seven, I’m more like double-oh-ten-thousand, way down the pecking order and I sure don’t have a license to kill. I don’t think I even have a license to punch in the nose.”
Of course, he’d killed quite a number of men. But he liked to pretend that was someone else. And it had never been like James Bond. The men who were killed in James Bond rarely begged for their lives.
He’d tried to stay away from field work, after one too many “on-site liquidations.” Tried to stay in the technical side of things. But sometimes the technical side of things took a little walk out into the field and started hunting around.
“What am I doing? Oh, some orbital mapping stuff over at the NSA. Technical gobbledygook. I pretend I understand it and they let me stay on the job a few more years.”
“You sound like you’re already thinking of retirement.” She looked at him with renewed interest, her short glossy black hair bobbing with the quick motion.
“Oh, I think about retirement every day. I’m not old enough to get full benefits though. So I keep putting it off. But it’s what I’d like to do.”
He gazed at her. Just taking her in. She was petite and intense like Kyoko had been. The same deep black eyes. You didn’t often see truly black eyes; usually “black” eyes were really dark brown, but Kyoko’s had been black and fathomless.
If I’d fathomed her, he thought, if I’d asked more often how she was feeling, she might’ve finally told me the truth.
He felt his eyes burning and looked away from Shannon. “Look at those big lugs out there,” he said, nodding toward the sea lions. “People throwing them fish. Big lugs just lying back sunning and eating. Man, that’s the life. Smelly but easy.”
“They do smell, don’t they? But I don’t mind. Once when I went snorkeling in Mexico—”
“You went to Mexico? You never told me that.”
“I sent you a card, Dad.”
“It didn’t get to me.”
“Because you move around too much.” She glanced at him, and there was some satisfaction in that glance. Like she’d found a way to underline the instability his rootlessness had brought to her life. Or his being rooted, anyway, in the Air Force. And how could you have roots in the air? “Anyway, the sea lions swam right to my snorkel mask, and one of them bumped on it with his nose, just to be playful.”
She smiled at the memory, and Stanner smiled, too, thinking of his daughter enjoying that little encounter with a sea creature.
He nodded appreciatively. “So, how’s work, Shannon?”
She shrugged. “I’m not getting a promotion. I swear they have a glass ceiling. I’m the best PR person they have.”
“Those people have a glass ceiling? I thought their whole trip was being liberal, some kind of ‘green’ investment firm, right? You’d think they’d be pro-women to a fault.”
Then he realized she was glaring at him. Just like Kyoko, she hated it when she wanted to bitch about something and he was “oh, such a Mr. Reasonable Male” as Kyoko had put it.
How could he explain? He couldn’t tell them that he’d seen things that’d break your mind if you didn’t convince yourself, at every last chance you had, that the world was a reasonable place after all. That enough of it was, anyway. That it wasn’t all shadows within shadows and unquestionable directives to do the unspeakable.
He couldn’t tell her about the dreams he’d been having, seeing that Burgess kid smashed into jelly, and in the dream Burgess yelling at him to push the table harder, get it over with, for god’s sake, kill me!, and him trying to say, no, no, it isn’t me, I’m not doing it, fella, I’m not, I swear, it isn’t me.
All he could do now was get a sheepish look and add lamely, “But then I wouldn’t know about glass ceilings.”
“Being a white establishment middle-class male, you haven’t experienced glass ceilings? Who’d of thunkit. You got that right, Dad. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”
At least she was calling him Dad. They walked along the pier, up to the street. “You didn’t say what brought you out here, Shannon. I’d like to think it was to see your old pop.”
“I’m pushing a line of cruelty-free cosmetics, perfume, that sort of thing. The company’s here; the investors want me to meet them. Give ’em a boost.”
Shannon picked a restaurant redolent of seafood, sharp with the smoke that rose from blackened fish. New Orleans–type cooking, Stanner supposed, which he disliked. It didn’t matter. He just wanted to look at his daughter and remember when she was little, building sand castles with him in Florida, back when he’d had the NASA posting, Kyoko smiling as she watched them from her beach towel, from behind her dark glasses.
They got a table too near the jazz band. He didn’t like jazz either, and they were remarkably loud for three guys with a stand-up bass, a hollow-body electric guitar, and a trap set. He ordered some bouillabaisse and she got the salmon. She seemed glad the music made it hard for them to talk much.
Afterwards, his daughter let him kiss her cheek good-bye, and was noncommittal when he invited her to spend some vacation time with him in the spring. He watched her get into a cab to go to her hotel.
Then he went to find his rented SUV, that big pain-in-the-ass glossy black thing, thinking about Kyoko and Shannon, so that he almost didn’t notice the guy who was tailing him.
But over the years he’d developed a lively feel for being followed. There was no doubt about it: Someone was following him, a stocky blond guy in a cheap blue suit, no tie, walking down the street about half a block behind, acting real casual, remembering to yawn with boredom and to stare witlessly into store windows.
Had the agency stopped trusting him so much they had him followed? Could it be the other side of the tracks at the DIA? Or someone else?
Stanner ducked into a doorway and waited to take the bull by the horns. Must’ve waited maybe ten minutes, but the guy had realized he’d been made. He dropped back, stayed clear.
Even so, the tail probably wasn’t far away. Stanner waited; waited till it got cold in the doorway, and he decided the hell with it for now.
He went to the SUV and drove back to Quiebra, thinking he’d have to change where he was staying and his car, too.
Because he realized, as he hit the Bay Bridge, that he had been picked up again. He was being followed by a whole team in three cars; one ahead, the other two strung back through the traffic. Not real good at it, but fairly professional.
He figured it was Gaitland’s people. And he figured that Bentwaters had told them he was an official loose cannon now. He had crossed over.
December 9, night
It was a fog-sticky dawn in eastern Quiebra Valley, and Evan Metzge
r didn’t want to be up and about, trudging across the overgrown old ranch from the truck to the barn, having to step around horseshit and dogshit. He was paying that fucking greaser to clean up out here, and still there was crap everywhere. Probably hadn’t cleaned out the kennels while the dogs were gone like he was told, neither. Someone was going to get his ass kicked and his pay docked.
He lit a cigarette and blew a weary stream of blue smoke as he walked up to the barn. Look at that, fucking Jeff or Carlos had left the barn door open; it was supposed to be locked up. Sheri f come through here, he could look right in there and see the dogfight setup, get the animal-control people all over our asses.
Tired, tired as a son of a bitch. He’d been fighting his dogs against some pretty well trained bulls, fighting ’em half the night over in Alameda County, and despite winning most of the fights, one of his best dogs had died and his bait dog—a small scared-looking redbone mutt that’d refused to fight, making it good only for baiting—had been torn to pieces the first night out, which was bad luck since it was better if they lived a few fights. That way you didn’t have to keep replacing bait dogs.
Then some of those nigger cocksuckers had given him a lot of shit about paying off on bets, which had meant having to wave his .45 around and shout the signal word to Donkey, who’d come in on his flank with the shotgun right on time. And what with the two guns and Metzger being a weight lifter with his head shaved and a Special Forces T-shirt—not that he was ever in the Special Forces, having been kicked out of the army for going AWOL from boot camp—the fucking jigs had backed down and paid up on their bets, but Donkey’d had to watch his back while he loaded his dogs into the truck. The whole thing, along with the bourbon and the crystal meth, had made him edgy, so when one of the dogs had been slow about getting into the truck he’d stoved in its ribs with a kick—one of his best pit bulls—and he’d end up selling it to a nigger for twenty bucks so it could be used as a bait dog before it died—if it lived that long.
Metzger was bone tired and he could smell his own stink. He was glad that grinning bastard Donkey’d gone home. He just wanted to take a bath and swallow a handful of Valium and hit the sack. But best make sure the barn was wired like it was supposed to be for his first big home dogfight, tonight.
