by James Reich
A blow-up of Cash’s Polaroid self-portrait appeared on the screen.
Her heart fell through her body. I fucked up, she thought. The snapshot showed nothing but a fuzzy exposure of cheek, a blurred blue eye, and a flash of messy black hair beneath her desert cap. The image was not even definitively female. Nevertheless, a hand clapped down hard on her shoulder and shook her so that her drink splashed from its glass.
“Hey, Cash, girl! It’s you!” The man pulled at the peak of Cash’s hat.
“Yeah, right!” she said, and the silent bar exploded into laughter.
She finished her drink in one long draw and left the bar with the sound of that laughter still ringing in her ears.
4
APRIL 3, 2011. ROBERT DRESNER ONLY KNEW HIS DIRECTOR AT the CIA as The Voice. Dresner was at the head of a group of five other agents at Langley, a covert rendition unit known by the code name Cross Spikes, or sometimes as The Hand. He knew Cross Spikes as a name from sixty-five years ago. It had been explained to him. The Cross Spikes Club was the name of the gin-soaked watering hole frequented by the sailors, scientists, and journalists stationed at the Bikini atoll during Operation Crossroads. Dresner, his director, and the men of his watch communicated through ghost phones on an undetectable off-grid exchange.
In his sharp herringbone suit accented with a red silk necktie detailed with small elephants, Dresner strutted along the crowded concourse of Reagan National Airport. He walked like a pair of chrome garden shears. Fixing his grin, he shouldered between travelers. After a job, every face that swam before him was split with violence and the atrocities he might commit upon it. Looking around for a shoeshine stand, Dresner eyed the sleek calves of a blond flight attendant, imaging them pressed against his shoulders as he fucked her, his left hand slapping idly at her pale breasts, his right choking her and releasing her, over and over. He always cooled off the aftermath of rendition by distracting himself with sex. People became ciphers, nameless mannequins under his blue-eyed gaze. His single testicle shifted in its sac as his pulse raced. The other had succumbed to an adolescent cancer.
The large windows along the concourse showed the slow progress of night flights taxiing on damp concrete. For a moment, they appeared to him as pale whales nosing toward the moon. Exhaustion is rendering you sentimental, Dresner, he thought. Glancing at his wristwatch, it was after ten o’clock. He caught sight of one of the others of the group, Agent Spicer, waiting in line at the Chinese buffet. He was fond of Spicer, despite his impetuosity. Their secret flight from Miami back to Washington, D.C., had come in after some turbulence and, now, they would melt back into the mills of ordinary people. Dresner decided to eat at a sports bar decorated with glitter-flecked lava lamps and arrayed with huge plasma screens that showed a series of football games. He seated himself on a bar stool at a small round table where he could see all of the screens at once. Thinking about his rendition team, Dresner experienced the essential loneliness of the quarterback, arranging the slobs and showboaters around him. He was almost forty-five years old, but appeared to be a decade younger. The first time that Robert Dresner had killed, when he was nineteen, it had been an accident. It happened in the first quarter while he was playing football for Oklahoma State. In 1986, he was facing Southwest Louisiana, making his calls in the glassy heat of Lafayette. The ball was snapped. He dummied a pass and set off as tacklers converged on him. He collided with one he had not seen closing on him. Their helmets cracked together like billiard balls dusted with gunpowder. Instantaneously, whipping at a freak angle, he heard the other’s neck snap. Weeks and months afterward, the sound would return to Robert Dresner when he tried to sleep. Yet, it slowed and opened, elongating and reverberating until it was suspended within him. Neck broken, the other lay motionless on the bright and sweating turf. One milky eye probed him while the brain faded out. The sound of that cracking returned to him when he fucked. It splintered his every pleasure. Dresner heard the sound so often that it became reassuring, indivisible from his best moments: He had killed, and no one blamed him. His transition to the black spaces of intelligence was a natural one.
A brunette in a striped referee’s jersey, knotted at her tanned navel, arrived to take his order. Immediately, he saw her dangling from a locker room clothing hook, his expensive belt looped around her neck, gasping as he entered her from behind. He ordered a burger and fries and a light beer. Beneath the circular table, hard as rock, his sex formed a missile-shaped impression in his pleated pants. There was no sense in reproaching himself for his violent desires; they were twenty-first century Americana.
The night before, Saturday, in Miami, Dresner and the Cross Spikes gang had ripped a Saudi student named Al-Zahrani off the streets. It had been clean. They had followed him from a nightclub called Morphine, one of the nouveau riche bars close to the beach with crystal, violet velvet upholstery, a crass explosion of polished chrome palm trees and Weimar pretensions. Al-Zahrani left alone, sober, followed by two of Dresner’s team who crossed the street and slipped into the black van where he and Spicer waited. Spicer was the driver, and Dresner sat behind. They did not need a full contingent. The van turned in the street, its tires hissing in the recent rainwater, but otherwise engineered to be almost soundless. Spicer did not turn on the headlights. At a break in the parked cars lining the pulsing neon lit street, Dresner ordered that Spicer pull in, and in a moment the van’s sliding door had opened and a black hood with a wire drawstring smothered Al-Zahrani as he was dragged inside. The asphyxiation of the hood prevented the student from screaming as he was searched for weapons. Spicer accelerated, turning on the headlights and heading for the airport. Other members of Cross Spikes waited there. Dresner pulled the hood from Al-Zahrani’s face. He had merely stared at his shoes, surrounded by Dresner and his three agents, perhaps knowing that he would never be able to name the void he was being taken to. He knew what was happening to him. The agents did not hide their faces. He did not weep. That was something. It made him guilty. Dresner took the young man’s hand, smiling, but Al-Zahrani merely continued to stare at his shoes. This attitude he maintained as Dresner closed a set of cold surgical pliers around the thumb of his right hand. Robert Dresner did not ask him any questions. He closed the pliers, fixing his grin as the Arab screamed inside the soundproof vehicle.
Waiting for his meal at Reagan National, Dresner’s telephone began to vibrate inside the breast pocket of his suit jacket. As usual, he reacted to it like a dog to its shock collar. He left his table forgetting that he had ever ordered food. Orienting himself on the polished concourse, he swiveled and pushed through an access door, finding himself on a metal gantry with narrow gunmetal stairs above and below him. In a moment, he knew that he was alone. He flipped the phone open and answered with the code. The calls rarely lasted more than one minute.
“11, 35, 165, 23.”
“Robert.” It was The Voice.
“Secure. Go ahead.”
“We have an alien target.”
“Al-Q again?”
“No. An amateur terrorist claiming former Soviet citizenship planted a bomb at the Trinity site in New Mexico. They want our attention. You will give it to them. They left a document on site, taped to the wall of a portable toilet. Albuquerque local news just reported it.”
“Soviet? Frozen in the past, but thawing out in the desert. How did it leak to the local news?”
“Two methods: firstly, tourist complaints. Those we could have buried silently. Secondly, a firefighter was killed and his family or colleagues would not let him go gentle. We’ll figure it out. We’ll screw the local news down from here, but this amateur made wider insinuations. After the wildfires that threatened Los Alamos last fall, I’m obliged to take it seriously. Tedious, Robert, but there it is. Will transfer what information and footage we have.”
“Is this to be a cap and gown job, Sir?”
“Affirmative. Nip this in the bud. Check your in-tray ASAP.”
“Out.”
The ca
ll lasted thirty-nine seconds. Striding through the airport toward the covered space where he left his car, Robert Dresner’s reflection in the glass of the stores and bars returned a man that might have become a slick, fashionable WASP model who might have fallen from the pages of any issue of Vanity Fair. He did not talk about his Oklahoma roots with his team. He had strong cheekbones, a rich brown post-Kennedy Harvard hairstyle. He was tall and muscular, without betraying a sense of bulk. The Voice’s reference to wildfires and Los Alamos confused him. He would have to look that up. As he made his way, he continued electing and evaluating the women in his path: to fuck, or not to fuck. Dresner kept a townhouse apartment where he lived alone, on Constitution Avenue NE, a pale Georgian building fronted by wide trees, close to the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol. Leaving the airport, steering his sleek black car toward the river, from the glove box he retrieved the gold bracelet that his fiancée had given him after he had proposed to her. Dresner pushed it back over his tanned wrist. Manacled again, he thought. He didn’t know if he meant it, or if machismo and gallows humor were part of the insincerity he needed to live. He loved her, in part because she represented the possibilities of his existence beyond black sites and renditions, the shades of his life about which she knew nothing. Nearing his forty-fifth year, or what he calculated represented the apex of his existence, the halfway line if he were fortunate, the extent to which he needed her had closed in from the distant horizon of his consciousness and now threatened to overwhelm him like an ecstatic fog. Beyond raw patriotism, he had begun to recognize himself as a relatively faithless creature. Certainly he was unfaithful, duplicitous, dispassionate, and cruel. Yet, within a year, they would marry, and he would slam shut that part of his past that belonged in some forgotten bunker of bureaucracy and violence. The loyalty he reserved for The Voice he would finally render unto her. He would be home in half an hour, provided that the traffic did not snarl up on the bridge. In a dusk rain and in the trail of bright evening taillights, he drove impatiently. It was always the same after he heard from The Voice; a kind of amphetamine clarity fell over his universe, lonely and benighted as it was. His apartment would be quiet, sparse, a place to concentrate. After reviewing the material and the footage, he could call his fiancée. He sucked the air-conditioned chill through his teeth as he pushed the accelerator down.
CASH PUSHED OUT OF THE CRACKED SALOON DOORS OF THE Coalmine Tavern. Climbing a loose slope, she walked alone along the ridge of carbon slag heaps above Madrid, working through her plan. It was a clear night. Something of the adrenaline of the attack on Trinity remained within her, mixing with some of the friction she had felt when the hand slapped her back and under the laughter of men. Now, with the vodka speeding and thinning her blood, she was far from falling asleep. She thought of the skyscraper of Winters Corporation waiting for her on the East Coast, anticipating the floral displays in the lobby of their high-rise tower, the air freshener in the mirrored elevator, how gore, brains, and clots of bloody hair would spray the walls of patriarchal office. “Before my twenty-fifth birthday,” she spoke aloud, shivering, “I will have killed an old man named Evelyn Winters, along with his sons Frederick and Kip.” She made a fist and hit her thigh in the gathering ecstatic force of her resolution. She was resolved that with the silver-haired master and his handsome heirs dead, her assassinations would suspend the Winters Corporation in a cryogenic freeze of mourning and doubt. Shares in the Winters Corporation would fall like bombs, and she would buy vital time for others of her kind, other activists and guerrillas who would rise in her wake. Women would organize against the penetrating silver worms of nuclear expansion, the uranium mines. They would stall the new reactors that the Winters Corporation had in blueprints. In such a climate of fear and risk, her attacks would halt the flow of nuclear expansion that had been secured by government-guaranteed money, wired to the corporate killers of the Financial District. In the desolation left by the assassination of the Winters men, a sense of futility would wash through the power plants, and the depression would render them more vulnerable, more exposed. Nothing would emphasize their insecurities more than the hollowing bodies of the Winters men emptying through the carpet and ceiling tiles of their Manhattan high-rise. Yet, there was more that she needed to accomplish.
Indian Point Nuclear Plant was a tumor sucking on the eastern shore of the Hudson River, its twin containment domes and vast red brick turbine halls reflecting in the corrupted waters to the north of New York City. It would be a night assault. Most of her strategies were nocturnal. She would stalk it, as though drawn by the bloody shaft of the narrow lighthouse that rose between the domes. Dense concrete balustrades, razor-wire fences and barricades, blast blocks, and hydraulic gates surrounded the buildings. An intricate network of security cameras mapped the ladders, gantries, parking lots, and approach roads. Inside, close to the Chernobyl-era reactors, hundreds of fuel rods hung suspended in vast tanks of Hudson River water, shimmering in blue light, submerged like a Chinese army. Exiting Highway 9 at the town of Buchanan, through parklands and coves, she would drive Indian Point Road. Ice would cling to the telegraph wires. The trees would glitter with sleet. She would watch the shutters closing on the pale houses. Reaching the intersection of Indian Point Road and Broadway, she would slow beneath the black signals swinging in the wind, checking for private security vehicles or cops waiting in darkened patrol cars. Across the intersection she would see the stop signs and the outermost gate of the facility. She would turn left, cruising slowly along the unlit, unoccupied Broadway. There she would turn off her headlights and drive along the fence line to the southeast.
Stepping from her car, wearing the camouflage jacket that she would buy in New York, she would conceal the wire cutters in her sleeve until she could be certain that the street was dead. Nightfall would bring the heightened scents of pine and damp earth. She would slice through the fence and force her way through, into the shroud of the tree line. At the interior edge of the forest, before emerging under the parking lot lamps, she would put on her wig and spectacles, shrug off the camouflage coat and leave it in the dark where it fell. She would walk toward the brutal facility. Indian Point Nuclear Plant, New York, would be her Troy in the Sex War.
Dressed in Jane Fonda redhead reporter drag, she would close in on the last mile to the site. She would wear a Winters Corporation name tag, stolen from the personnel department of their Manhattan offices, in her charcoal houndstooth lapel. As Cash scuffed along the coal lines above Madrid, she envisaged the scenarios of resistance that she might face and overcome. Nothing would stop her. Seduction, rage, chloroform, persuasion, flattery, sex would get her inside the turbine halls.
“I can’t let you in there, ma’am.” She imagined the security guard to be middle-aged, and bored. She saw a man struggling with a salary that he resented.
“But I was just in there, already. I’m a reporter. I was being shown a tour by, oh, shit, what was his name? It was on his hard hat . . . William Gibson.” She stole the name from The China Syndrome. “He told me which way to the restroom, but I guess I stumbled out of an exit. I feel so stupid. Look, if I hadn’t come from inside, I’d be soaking wet like you. Look at my hair: dry as a bone. I’m a reporter with credentials and an invitation.” She would pull her lapel forward for the security guard to see. “Everyone thinks this place is dangerous. I’m going to tell the truth about Indian Point. I’m not your enemy. Come on, do I look like a terrorist?” She would swivel one foot on the toe of her pumps, showing a seam of stocking.
In her left jacket pocket, she would finger the small flask of chloroform and her silk handkerchief, subtly unscrewing the cap. In the other pocket she would carry condoms and a plastic zip bag of raw meat. In her sleeve, she had fixed her gun. There was a chance that she would have to kill or give one of the perimeter guards or the dog handler sex to get in. She would finish whatever was necessary, spit in the floodlit gravel, and advance toward the turbine hall and the control room. It would
be April 26. On this twenty-fifth anniversary, she would make herself into an arrow that would be impossible to break or deflect.
Finally, she saw herself in the control room of Unit Two. This rehearsal fantasy of the end of her life caused her heart to beat wildly. The effort of regulating the palpitations and sweats would leave her with a fierce migraine pain, yet these dangerous apparitions of her assault on Indian Point were irresistible. She moved through the bittersweet ache of their inevitability. In the control room, she would wear a tape recorder fixed to her belt, and she would hold the old-fashioned interview microphone on its curling flex in her left hand. Her right hand would remain in her pocket. She planned to discard the chloroform having gained entry. The snub barrel of her silent gun would only barely protrude from the hole that she would have cut from her right jacket pocket, so that she could shoot, and shrug. She would approach, smiling and extending her microphone. Suddenly, holes and wounds would appear in her enemies as though spontaneous explosions had burst their torsos and blasted open their white scientific coats and overalls. Disembodied, she watched herself moving seductively between the instrument panels like Medusa. Sometimes, dying eyes would stare at her in disbelief. She would fully understand the appeal of her soundless gun to the KGB. The combat would spread to the whitewashed gantries and through the vast bulbs of the machine.
Security gunfire would echo through the cathedrals of cancer, black clouds over the containment domes. She would abandon her disguise as the violence raged out of control. Her enemies would try to hold their fire, fearful of damaging the electrical circuits that maintained the rods and safety of the reactor. Some would hesitate to harm a young woman. She would bring chaos, inflicting wounds and terror. The computer monitors would be spattered with blood. Gauges would crack in the spray of her bullets. Red warning lights would revolve in the metal corridors. Hatches would slam shut and a song of complete despair would arise from their throats. Men would calcify in her gaze and turn to ash in her sights. Yet, gradually, the firewall would close. She envisioned herself wounded and losing consciousness on a high and bloodied walkway, closing her eyes on the glowing reactor core.
