“You see that?” Brooks asked him.
The guy shook his head. “See what?”
Chapter 12
Sleep had wiped the memory of the cavalcade of military vehicles from Becca’s mind, and the image didn’t come back to her until she was standing in almost the same spot again in the cold light of a wind-chilled morning, holding the leash while Django sniffed the ground. The waterfront streets were oddly quiet for a Sunday morning, even for her disaster-zone warehouse neighborhood.
She turned the TV on while making toast and tea, but the toast went cold, unbuttered and uneaten, while she stared at the newscasts and flipped through the networks.
Cable news wasn’t in her budget. She had a digital antenna for the networks and got most of her news from the Internet. Soon she was sitting on the futon with her laptop, her attention divided between the two screens as she tried to sift speculation from fact. But no matter how often she refreshed the browser or flipped the channels, there were no definitive answers about who was responsible for the massacre that had rocked the city. The newscasters seemed to share her frustration that the authorities wouldn’t commit to classifying it as a terror attack or an accident. The former seemed likely, judging by the grainy surveillance camera pictures they kept showing, depicting a “person of interest” wanted for questioning: a young man in a suede coat and sunglasses with dark hair and headphones around his neck.
Had he set off a bomb? That seemed to be the most popular theory among the experts parading before the cameras, but if it was a bomb, no one seemed to know what kind. And if you watched the reporting long enough and tuned your attention to what wasn’t being said, the omissions painted a more frightening picture than the stark fact of seven dead and ten injured on the Outbound Red Line. No one was calling it biological, chemical, or dirty radioactive, and no one was outright denying those possibilities. There was no mention of shrapnel, but there was talk of severe trauma. And while most of the passengers had apparently survived the event, none of the witnesses were being interviewed on TV.
Had some stomach-churning facts been redacted to prevent mass panic? The MBTA was in lockdown for the day. On social media she found a link to a video of some people in Hazmat suits patrolling part of the Green Line with handheld devices. It had provoked a comment flame war, debating whether or not these were Geiger counters. Becca bookmarked the clip, but when she tried to pull it up again twenty minutes later to send the URL to Rafael, it turned up a 404 error. That was when she realized she’d been soaking up paranoia for a good three hours of escalating anxiety. The caffeine from the tea she’d been refilling wasn’t helping either. She turned the TV off, tossed the now stale toast into the trash, and curled up on the floor and spooned Django until she shut down from stress and fell asleep.
When she woke, she was ravenous. By the shadows on the floor, she guessed she’d been out for a little over an hour. The sun had passed its noontime zenith, and she still hadn’t eaten anything. Nor had she taken her medication for the day. Not good this time of year, with the city sliding toward apocalypse.
She made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and tried to eat it at her computer, but she ultimately had little more than two bites once she started clicking through the photos from the mill, nervously scratching at the scab on her arm.
Blood, grime, and arabesques of alien anatomy.
She couldn’t force herself to view them at more than thumbnail size for more than a few nauseating seconds, and eventually realized that she was merely sorting them to identify the best examples of the phenomena, and that she was doing this to shoot a few over to Neil Hafner. “Uncle” Neil, who had given her her first camera lessons at Catherine’s request, who had written her a letter of recommendation for art school when she bombed her SATs because she was too depressed to deal, and who now owned F-Stop Camera Shop, off of the C train in Brookline.
Becca wanted to see Neil in person, wanted to watch his face when he first looked at the pictures, and most of all wanted to hear his calm, good-humored voice as he teased her about them and explained how they could have come to be. But with the MBTA shut down, an email exchange would have to do for now. She opened a new message, attached the three photos in the largest resolution her mail provider would allow, and typed:
Hey Neil,
Hope all is well with you on this crazy day, but you probably know more about what’s going on than the rest of us, given your old crime lab contacts. As for me I’m pretty freaked out, but hey, guess what? I adopted a dog. Well, rescued one, anyway. I’ll send you a pic soon. Meanwhile, would you please take a look at these photos I took yesterday that are also kinda freaking me out? They’re digital infrared from the modified Nikon. I have not photoshopped them for any effect. This is how they came off the card. So WTF are we seeing anyway? When I shot them, they were of blank walls. You can still see the brick in one and the sheetrock in the others, but there was no sign of whatever that crazy pattern is (tentacles?) during the shoot.
Call me please, after you’ve had a look?
Thanks,
Becca
Now that she was finally confronting the photos on her big screen, they sucked her in. She even thought of it in those terms when she glanced up at the clock on the menu bar and saw that almost four hours had passed. Sucked in. Was that what had happened to Moe Ramirez? Had he been sucked into a wall?
Impossible, right?
But she had grown up with the impossible. Didn’t like to think about it much, didn’t care to look at it straight on, but it had always been there in the periphery of her life. Whispered snatches of conversations she’d caught as a child after sneaking out of bed and hiding in the dark at the top of the stairs. First in the home she barely remembered, where she’d eavesdropped on her parents, and then, after her mother was gone and her father was drinking and looking toward the mountains, spying on her grandmother who had been in some ways more secretive and in others…less. As an adolescent, she had been so angry at them all for keeping secrets from her, so determined to one day uncover the truths that had shattered her family.
(Do not call up what you cannot put down.)
Now, grown and sensing darkness on the fringes of a forgetful life, she didn’t want to know the answers.
Was it that she didn’t want to know, or that she couldn’t risk shattering what little stability she had built for herself one brick at a time? If those bricks now formed a wall against the past, then so be it. The mural she’d painted on it was more comforting than the reality it kept at bay. It was certainly better than ending up in an asylum like her grandfather.
And yet, she couldn’t entirely silence the part of her mind that was too smart for total denial, the part that was good at making connections. That part of her was busy just below the surface, tying strings between the oddities of her childhood and those emerging now. Hello darkness my old friend. Her mother had loved that song. Well, she’d played it a lot, anyway. There were days when the only sound in the house was that damned song, and then she was gone, and the fighting in hushed tones after bedtime was gone, and Becca was left with what Paul Simon had been promising her for weeks through a phonograph needle at her mother’s prompting: the sounds of silence.
She stared at the image of Maurice’s cardboard crown. That one was the worst. The crown in a puddle of blood. The others she could almost chalk up to interpretation. It was easy to ascribe biological features to complex patterns, like seeing faces in a water-stained ceiling. Heaven knew she’d often sought out such features of old buildings for that exact effect. Looking for meaning in the mold. But the crown, and the fucking Burger King logo…that was more than a pattern extrapolated from complex chaos. And if the crown was real, did that mean the other…things were also real?
Mold and water stains were real, but that didn’t make the faces they resembled real. And if some interference in the infrared spectrum looked like a fractal, and that fractal looked like it was made of tentacles, and the suckers on those tentacl
es looked like eyes…that didn’t mean that when you stared into the abyss the abyss was staring into you.
Suckers. Sucked in. Poor Maurice. She blinked and her eyes burned from staring at the damned screen. She pressed her palms against her closed eyes. The pressure felt good. Violet splotches bloomed in her mind, and she could hear the beating of helicopter blades.
Across the apartment her cell phone was ringing, but it was soon drowned out by the sound of the rotors. She went to fetch the phone and saw a black helicopter flying alarmingly close to the big windows. It wasn’t one of those bubbly traffic or news choppers either, but a long, angular military looking type. It swept out and away, circling around the building. The caller ID on her phone read: NEIL HAFNER. She took the call and jammed the phone into her ear to hear him over the noise. “Hey, Neil, you got my email?”
“I’m sorry, Becca.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I tried to tell them you have nothing to do with this.”
“Who?”
“Is that a helicopter? Listen to me, they’re coming for you and you need to just go with them. Don’t be scared.”
“Neil? You’re scaring me. Who are they?”
“SPECTRA. You’ve never heard of them, but I made the mistake of forwarding your email to somebody. They would have caught the keywords anyway, so maybe it’s better that I contacted them—”
“Wait. Slow down.” He was talking so fast she couldn’t keep up. He sounded panicked. It was a tone she didn’t associate with his voice at all, and she realized that she doubted it was really him on the other end.
A double bang echoed through the warehouse from above, and she suddenly felt like she was inside a giant steel barrel that someone had decided to use as drum. Her heart rate jumped and her mouth went dry. Staring at those photos had primed her for paranoia, and a black helicopter landing on the roof did nothing to alleviate the feeling.
“Is this Neil Hafner?” She asked.
“Yes, Becca, it’s me. I asked them to let me bring you in, but they wouldn’t. I’m just a retired forensics geek. But they won’t hurt you, okay? I’ll come to you, I promise, I’ll find you.”
Jackboots echoed in the stairwell. “Find me where? Where are they taking me? Neil? Neil!”
“You have to understand that they’re scared too, Becca. They’re in crisis mode… high alert…fucking DEFCON 2.”
Django was barking now, going into territorial-defense mode and sounding a whole lot bigger than he really was. Becca plugged a finger in her open ear. “This is because of the pictures? My pictures? You said something about a keyword. What word?”
“Tenta—”
The call cut out.
The door burst inward and rebounded off the wall. Men in riot gear flooded into the loft, rifles cocked on their shoulders, eyes boring through scopes. Black Kevlar vests and helmets and Velcro pockets bulging with tech and weaponry. They were shouting orders at her and each other and reporting into headsets. Django was holding his ground between her legs and barking at them through an almost tangible cloud of testosterone, Becca desperately holding him by the collar to keep him from lunging and biting. Later she would wonder what she would have done if she hadn’t had the dog to deal with, to protect. Maybe she would have put her hands up or curled up in a ball on the floor in the kitchen. But with Django trying to defend her all she could think about was keeping him from getting shot. It would be so damned easy, so justifiable for them to just shoot him and be done with it.
The armored men (and one woman, she could now see) surrounded her in a circle. A short, stocky one with a soul patch was yelling at her, spittle flying in foamy white bubble drops: “Shut that fucking dog up! Shut it up now or I will shut it up for you!”
She went down on her knees and wrapped her arms around Django, shaking her head, and feeling heat welling up in her face, unsure if it was fear or anger or some sickly blend of both. Django’s emaciated body lurched with every aggressive bark, and she couldn’t calm him, couldn’t break his fixation on the threat he perceived, and sure as hell couldn’t shut him up, but she could cover him enough that they’d have to put a bullet through her to get one in him.
A tall man with eyes the color of a chemical ice pack was telling her to put her hands on her head, and he sounded calm enough now that he was closer than shouting distance, now that he could see that it was mostly an open living space, now that his scouts were shouting, “Clear!” from every partitioned area, and it was becoming apparent that they were dealing with a solitary, skinny girl.
But Soulpatch hadn’t calmed down at all. He was towering over Django trying to stare him down and only making him escalate, and now she saw him remove a can of mace from a vest pocket.
For one crazy moment she didn’t think about all of the guns pointed at her. The world contracted to just Django and the man with the mace, and she punched him hard in his armored gut, rocking him backward on his heels.
Something snapped in her wrist, a bright, jarring pain twanging up her arm. There was a chorus of ratcheted weapons and a tightening of the bodies around her.
The calm, ice-eyed commander put his gloved hand on Soulpatch’s chest to restrain him from retaliation. Becca fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around Django as he snapped and barked and tried to break free.
“I’ll let you cuff me, but you have to let me crate my dog first!”
“Where’s the crate?”
“By the TV.”
“Copeland, bring that dog crate over here and make sure it’s empty.”
“Yes sir.” One of the men closest to the living room slung his rifle across his back and carefully removed the blanket from the crate as if he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of finding a bomb in it. He brought the crate over, set it down at Becca’s feet, and opened the cage door.
She guided Django in and latched it, still kneeling on the floor, then put her hands on her head. She could feel her body and mind shutting down as they pulled her hands behind her back and cuffed her, and ransacked the apartment.
They went for the studio first, where they pulled the partition walls and tapestries down before unplugging and packing her computers and hard drives into metal attaché cases. They sealed her SD cards and USB memory sticks in Ziploc bags, checked the scanner bed, and packed up her cameras and notebooks.
The last thing they bagged was Becca Philips. They didn’t read her the Miranda, just zip-tied her wrists and slipped a black bag over her head, and marched her up the clanging metal steps to the rooftop where they shunted her into the helicopter, strapped her down, and lifted off in a whirlwind.
* * *
When Becca came to, she wasn’t wearing the bag anymore, but the room she lay in was dark. She figured she must have passed out from the reduced oxygen. The bag had smelled like stale coffee. The room reeked of disinfectant. It was either in an empty building or one that was well soundproofed. She felt around in the darkness and found a cushioned pad that she might have been placed on, and might have rolled off. She was still dressed in her cargo pants and favorite black TOOL T-shirt. The only visible feature of the room was a thin rectangle of light, a little thicker at the bottom, delineating the door. She got up and went to it. Tried the handle just for a laugh. It was of course locked. But the attempt earned her the attention of the guard on the other side. The lights came on—florescent bars behind a cage in the ceiling—and the door opened. A kid with a crew cut blocked the opening. He was dressed in khaki fatigues with a shoulder patch that said SPECTRA BOSTON, the heel of one hand casually resting on the butt of his sidearm.
“Glad to see you’re awake, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’ll let them know.”
“Water. Please.”
“You got it.”
He closed the door. She looked around the room. There were no chairs but she didn’t want to be sitting on the floor when they came in, whoever they were, so she leaned against the wall facing the doo
r, knee cocked, arms crossed. A closed-circuit camera on a ceiling-mounted bracket watched her from the corner.
When the door opened again, the crew-cut kid came in with a pair of folding chairs and set them up in the middle of the room. Behind him was a redheaded guy with a bit of a grizzled look. He didn’t have fatigues on like the kid, but a shirt and tie—sleeves rolled up, a titanium watch on his wrist among the ginger hair and freckles. He didn’t smile but handed her a cold, perspiring bottle of water and said, “Rebecca Philips, I’m Agent Jason Brooks. Please have a seat.”
Becca ran her thumb around the top of the water bottle. The cap was sealed, and she didn’t feel any pinprick holes from where they might have put a syringe in it, but that probably didn’t mean much. They could easily have put a needle in her arm after she’d fainted, anyway, so she cracked the seal and took a gulp.
Brooks sat and flipped his tie out of his crotch. He looked like the kind of detective who would never get used to wearing one. Becca sat down facing him, elbows on knees, bottle dangling between them. She was exhausted, even though all she’d done since waking up was write an email and get abducted at gunpoint.
“What the fuck is SPECTRA?” she asked, “Is that some kind of new surveillance arm of the government?”
“SPECTRA?”
“The patch on Opie’s shoulder. Looks like the Pink Floyd logo.”
Agent Brooks laughed, and for a second she could imagine him hanging out at her favorite bar and buying a round for everyone when the Sox hit a homerun. She didn’t want to like him, but that was probably why they’d sent him in here first, because he had some charm he was about to use on her like some kind of interrogational jujitsu. But the whole situation was absurd anyway because she had nothing to hide; she was nobody and knew nothing. They had bagged the wrong girl.
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