Tentacles. She almost said it aloud when she remembered the call from Neil, but stopped herself. Why would that word trigger such a heavy-handed reaction? She decided she wanted to at least hear some questions before she started blindly tossing out answers.
Brooks ran his thumb and forefinger across his stubble, still grinning. “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t really get it either. Covert agencies have logos now. I guess the lawmakers like to see something for the money.”
Becca nodded. “What does it stand for?”
“Wouldn’t make any sense to you.”
“Try me.”
“Special Physics Emergent Counter Terror Recon Agency.”
“That’s a mouthful. So…you think I had something to do with what happened on that train. Well, I didn’t even hear about it until I turned on the TV today.”
“We’ve been through your camera cards and computers and there are quite a few photos of subway tunnels. MBTA stations that have been closed since the flood, station gates where the locks have been removed with bolt cutters. Doesn’t look good.”
Becca crinkled the water bottle in her hands. She suddenly felt the need to tread very carefully. There had been stories over the years about people—sometimes the wrong people, sometimes American citizens—getting lost in the labyrinth of the War on Terror. The word Rendition floated up from the back of her mind like a warning written in red light.
She needed support from outside. She needed people to know where she was. She thought of Rafael and wondered if he too was in an interrogation room. The possibility filled her with both hope and dread: that he might be in the same building, that he might not be free to find out she’d been taken and tell someone. Tell who? The media?
She felt sweat beading at the base of her hairline as she realized she had no idea where this room was. They’d taken her by helicopter and she had no idea how long she’d been blacked out or if they had drugged her. Was she even in Boston anymore? Massachusetts? Was it even the same day?
In spite of the water, her mouth was dry again. She opened it and spoke in careful, measured sentences. “I think I’m here because of my friend, Neil Hafner. He had a career in law enforcement. Do you know him?”
“We’ll get to that. Why the pictures of subway features, Ms. Philips?”
“Urbex.”
“That sounds about as meaningful as SPECTRA. What’s URBEX?”
“Urban exploration. Google it. It’s like…part hiking, part exploring, part archaeology, only in modern cities. My friends and I do it mostly for the photography. It’s sort of an art school thing.”
“Trespassing in restricted areas of public transportation is art now?”
“We’re not even vandals. You have all my pictures, so you know I shoot all kinds of abandoned places, not just the T.”
“We are analyzing your photos, yes, and I’m sure we’ll have many questions about them soon. But let me ask you something. Your answer will determine how this is gonna go for you, so think about what we already know and what we will know by the end of the day before you try to lie to me.”
Becca raised an eyebrow.
“We’re getting to know each other here. I belong to SPECTRA. You belong to URBEX. Do you also belong to the Starry Wisdom Church?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have photos of the leader of that organization on your computer? Photos of the Reverend John Proctor taken at Allston State Hospital on what members of that church consider to be a holy day?”
“I photograph anyone who looks interesting.”
“Yeah. So do we. We read their web sites too, and these people happen to believe that mankind’s greatest accomplishment was raising the sea level a few feet to make coastal cities more comfortable for their dark gods. They want to sacrifice us all to their dark gods. Sound familiar? Have you visited any of these web sites? Don’t fuckin’ lie to me, it’ll take me five minutes to find out.”
Becca turned the cap of the water bottle back and forth: clockwise and counter, bit her lip, and said, “Think I’m gonna need a lawyer.”
“We’re not the police.”
“So I’m not being detained?”
“Ms. Philips, this city is in the grip of a National Security crisis. You don’t get a lawyer until it’s too late for him to save you from the consequences of the choice you make right now to help or hinder.”
“What’s your name again, Agent?”
“If you’re going to help me, you can call me Jason.”
“Jason, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m not a cultist or a terrorist, okay? I take pictures of fucked-up, abandoned places because I’m fucked up and abandoned. I’m just looking for beauty in the cracks.”
Brooks took a device from his pocket—about the same size as a phone, but with a hooded lens. He swiped through some options on a touch screen and the lights in the cage overhead went dark while the wall to Becca’s left was illuminated with a crystal-clear slide projection of one of the fractal tentacle shots she’d taken at the mill.
“Is this the kind of beauty you’re taking about?” he asked her, the image shuddering slightly when he couldn’t keep his hand perfectly still. “Because that looks pretty fuckin’ ugly to me. What is it?”
She gazed at the photo in awe. Seeing a picture she’d taken of a wall now projected on another wall, she could finally ascribe a sense of scale to the writhing anatomy. It shallowed her breathing. “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow in her ears, and she was grateful for the darkness in the room masking the vulnerability she felt when confronted with a power that made the full weight of the government seem meek in comparison. “And you know I don’t know because you’ve read the email I wrote to Neil, and that’s who I want to talk to.”
“Not happening.”
“Get me Neil and send someone to feed my dog. Otherwise I’m not talking.”
The image shuddered across the wall and disappeared as Brooks threw his metal chair at it. Becca flinched and held her hands up in front of her face. She could feel him towering over her in the dark as he shouted. “You do not. You do not get to make the rules, and we are NOT FUCKING AROUND HERE! People died in that tunnel. I was there, and kids died. Parents who are never going home to their kids died. I don’t give a shit about who you want to talk to and I sure as hell don’t give a shit about your damned dog!”
He drew a ragged breath and waited for her to dare reply. The silence and darkness welled around them.
“You’re wasting time on me,” Becca said. “Neil knows how to read photos and he’s the only person I’m talking to.”
When the lights came up Brooks was already at the door. He left without looking back.
Becca sighed. She probed her right wrist with her left thumb, gingerly flexing the joint, and feeling for shattered bones. It hurt like hell from the impact of punching the Kevlar vest.
Chapter 13
Brooks stepped into the hall, into the gray wash of cloud-attenuated sunlight spilling in from the windows overlooking Government Center and Faneuil Hall. He stepped up to the glass and looked down on Congress Street, scratching the back of his head and thinking about how Becca Philips had no idea how close to home she was right now. Just a few miles to the east across the Channel, they were still taking her apartment apart, searching for anything she might have kept off of her computers: a handwritten journal or little black book of contacts tucked away behind a vent grill, under a floorboard, or inside a mattress. Wouldn’t it be nice if she really was a conspirator? But he already didn’t believe she was, just as he knew he was going to have one of the guys over there feed the damned dog.
He had lost it in there and needed to regain his composure. The kids on the train had shaken him. He’d held it together until now, but the clock was ticking on catching this monster. He would need to try another tack with Philips. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew something or suspected something that she wasn’t willing to give them. And why should she be h
olding back? Well, Blue Team would be rounding up the entire congregation of the Starry Wisdom Church presently, and within two hours everyone would be talking about everyone else, hoping to cut a deal. Then he would see if Ms. Philips was still singing the same song.
Reluctantly, Brooks raised his gaze over the gray buildings, the silver and black shimmer of the New Waterfront, and let it drift to where it always did now whenever he could stand to let it: that corner of the sky where the black sun pulsed like a migraine. It was still there, but he’d known that as soon as he’d approached the window. It was almost always in his peripheral vision when he was near a window or on the street. And always in the same region of the heavens. The sun and moon moved through their courses, but the black star remained fixed at what appeared to be low altitude. It did not orbit, and if it rotated, it kept pace with the earth, with the city. Didn’t they call Boston The Hub? If it was, then this damned thing was a playing card stuck in a spoke.
“What are you on about Brooks? Playing cards?” Dick Hanson had emerged from the monitor room and taken a place beside him at the window. Shit. Had he been talking aloud? This was exactly the kind of thing that made him worry that the event in the subway had scrambled his brain. Was he cracking? Didn’t people with tumors sometimes experience weird ocular effects? Brooks wondered if he should take a leave, get an MRI, tell Hanson he was seeing shit that wasn’t there.
And leave people like Hanson and his cronies at Limbus to protect the city? To protect my daughter?
“Huh? Playing card? I said ‘this case is hard.’ She’s a hardcase, this young lady.”
“So far, sure. You think she knows something, has some involvement?”
Brooks squinted at the horizon. “She probably just stumbled into it. Probably doesn’t really know shit. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“So why is she pushing back?”
“Oh, I don’t know…anger at being abducted? Maybe cooperating with authority just goes against her grain.”
“Well, the only connection we can find to the church is that photo she took of the reverend. She doesn’t seem to have many friends, but we’ll drag her teachers in here if we have to, and they’ll at least care about losing their jobs. We’re also trying to track down the guy who shows up in her phone records the most. Rafael Moreno. Might be a boyfriend.”
Brooks looked from the black orb in the sky to Hanson and back again, but the man clearly didn’t see it dripping darkness in thin swathes upon the city, like ribbons of oily black incense smoke that flowed down instead of up.
SPECTRA had found most of the people who had been in the train car, all of the survivors. Some were still in ICU at MGH, but the rest were being held in this facility under the auspices of a quarantine. They had been told that if the weapon were found to contain a biological agent, there could be a risk of contagion. While the idea had shaken them and made them harder to interview, it had at least kept the lawyers and the ACLU at bay. It didn’t keep the media away, though, and some of the survivors’ names had already been leaked. The government couldn’t hold them much longer. They had all tested negative for radiation and infectious germs, but they didn’t need to know that just yet. And Brooks’ superiors had made it clear that the real risk of releasing them was that their stories (or worse, their perceptions) might be contagious, especially given the number of reporters ready and willing to expose the general population. Brooks wasn’t exactly sure he understood these concerns. He’d heard of ideas going viral but had never taken the metaphor as literally as some of his superiors appeared to.
He knew only this: The subjects in holding all reported seeing the same weird shit on the train that he had. Except for one man and one woman who had been wearing earbuds and listening to music at the time. Those two had only seen the effects of the violence—people being ripped apart by invisible things. There was a possibility that those invisible things had not seen the Vietnamese engineer or the young lady student either, because neither had been harmed. Statistically that was well within the realm of coincidence because they weren’t the only ones left unscathed, but the others were mostly people who had been positioned at the other end of the subway car when the shit hit the fan. The two who had been wearing earbuds when it started had taken them out once they became aware of the massacre in full swing, but even then they hadn’t been able to see what was causing it.
Brooks had lied at his debriefing, claimed he’d been listening to his iPod as well and hadn’t been exposed to the sounds that started it all. He’d made the snap judgment to lie mostly on instinct when the pieces of the puzzle were still coming together, but he hadn’t regretted his choice yet. In the past twenty-four hours he’d only heard things that confirmed his gut decision. Like the suggestion from one of the Limbus operatives that they could wipe out the witnesses with an actual bio-war germ if it became necessary to make that the official story. Brooks hadn’t told anyone about the black sun he saw over the city, but when he’d visited a critical patient at Mass General, and realized that the man’s room was on the Western side of the building, he had pulled back the curtain and asked him if he saw anything. The man, an English professor at Tufts, had described the thing better than Brooks ever could.
The suspect with the boom box had been wearing high-end noise cancellation headphones, apparently as a prophylactic against what he’d unleashed. Like some kind of drug, the sound opened a new level of perception in those exposed. And somehow this expanded perception made them vulnerable to attack from what they saw. If the director found out Brooks had been exposed, he’d be sitting in one of the soundproofed rooms ten floors down with the rest of the cattle, waiting for a verdict.
Hanson was still talking. Brooks tried not to stare at that damned spot in the sky, tried to stay present.
“Sorry?”
“You don’t look so hot. You get any sleep since it happened?”
“No.”
“You should go get some before you pass out on your feet.”
“Not until we catch the guy. I’ll sleep then.” He couldn’t help glancing back at the sky and following the lines of two black tendrils that had become more prominent than the others. One of these led to the John Hancock Tower, the other (thicker and blacker) dripped behind that sci-fi looking building at 111 Huntington Avenue near the Christian Science Center.
“Without a lead, that could be days,” Hanson said.
“You think it will be?” He balked at the prospect of sitting around waiting for a lead. He needed a reason to get back in the field where he could make up for his losses on the train.
“No. The facial recognition software’s come a long way, and he’s in the database somewhere. Everyone is now, thanks to social media. He’ll turn up on some gas station cam. Just a matter of time. And the geeks dissecting his device will come up with some kind of explanation. Or a theory anyway. A foothold for what we’re dealing with.”
“Well, I’m not good at waiting. I’d like to try something.”
“What’s that?”
“The witnesses. The ‘mass hallucination group.’ Let’s get some of them out of the basement and ask them if they see anything else that we can’t. Take them up to the top of the Pru and see if they can spot any residual weirdness anywhere. It just might lead us to the guy or his associates.”
Daniel Northrup, SPECTRA’s own top spook, had joined the conversation, lit a cigarette, and planted his shoulder blades and the bottom of one shoe against the wall. Smoking was supposed to be illegal in the government building, but Northrup was a law unto himself. He’d been staring at the veined marble tiles that covered the lower half of the walls and listening to the exchange between Brooks and Hanson. Now he swiveled his head in their direction and Brooks found himself marveling, as usual, at the perfect frosting in the man’s sideburns and temples, and wondering if anyone could be so vain as to dye gray into their black hair to get that distinguished effect.
Northrup poked the air gently but emphatically with the burning ch
erry. “We are not taking them out in public. You can have three at a top floor window of this building.”
Brooks nodded.
“Well? Get on it,” Northrup said, exhaling a drag.
* * *
Becca swallowed her pride and asked the guard to bring her an Ibuprofen and an Ace bandage for her wrist. That was the last contact she’d had for what felt like two hours, but at least it had brought enough relief to keep her idle mind from dwelling on the injury and how stupid she’d been to attack an armed soldier, or cop, or paramilitary goon. Whatever. When the door opened again, Jason Brooks was holding her army green camera bag, presumably with her Nikon in it.
“You ever do any aerial photography?” he asked.
“Can’t say I have.”
“First time for everything.” He handed her the bag. She took it without thinking, and a sharp pain shot through her wrist. She shifted the bag to her left hand and wondered if she could even operate her camera with the injury. Brooks frowned at her and raised an eyebrow at the Ace bandage.
“It’s from hitting one of your thugs,” she said. “I don’t know if I can hold my camera with it. Damned brick of a thing. What do you want me to shoot, anyway?”
“The city. From a helicopter.”
Becca laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“Uh, don’t you guys have all kinds of satellites for that? Are budget cuts so bad that you need an art student with no zoom lens?”
“I want your infrared images. Whatever it is you normally do to get the pictures.”
“Well, I doubt I can do much good with a sprained wrist in a moving helicopter.”
“I’ll get you a brace. If you do this, I’ll get you that talk with your so-called uncle too, deal?”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that.”
“Your dog’s been fed. I saw to it.”
“So your guys are still raiding my underwear drawer?”
Red Equinox Page 12
