“Why do you say of course not?” asked Gallo.
“I have a girlfriend,” said Altman.
“What does that prove?” asked Ramos.
“Look,” said Altman. “Why won’t you tell me what happened?”
The two officers exchanged glances again.
“Was there anything unusual about Hammond’s behavior?” asked Gallo.
“How the hell should I know if there was anything usual about his behavior?” said Altman. “I only met him once. I don’t have anything to compare his behavior to.”
“No need to get upset,” said Ramos, “no need to get excited.”
“Throat,” said Gallo, and drew his finger across his own throat.
“What?” said Altman.
“You asked how he died,” said Gallo. “He had his throat cut.”
“He had a knife with him,” said Ramos. “Do you know whose prints were on it?”
“Whose?” said Altman.
“No one’s,” said Gallo. “The knife had been wiped clean.”
“Do you think I did it?” said Altman. “Why would I do it?”
“How would we know why?” said Ramos coolly. “We don’t even know what the two of you talked about.”
“What did you talk about?” asked Gallo.
“This is crazy,” said Altman. “You think he might have been killed because of something we discussed?”
“How can we know until you tell us what it was?” asked Ramos.
So Altman did. He took a deep breath and then began, best as he could remember, to recount the conversation they had had. When he said the name DredgerCorp, he watched the two officers exchange glances again. As he spoke further, he watched as first Ramos then Gallo crossed their arms.
When Altman finished, Gallo stood up from the chair and said, “Thank you, Mr. Altman. You’ve been very helpful.” Ramos was already moving toward the door.
“Wait a minute,” said Altman. “That’s it?”
“What did you expect?” asked Ramos. “That we were going to arrest you?”
“We’ll be back in touch if we need you,” said Gallo, and then the two of them were gone.
He called Ada to talk to her about it, but she didn’t pick up. He still felt unsettled. His hands, he realized, were shaking.
After a while, Field limped back in. “Everything all right?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“Somebody I know was killed,” Altman said.
“Ah,” said Field. “That’s terrible news.”
Am I in danger myself? Altman wondered.
“Did you hear the news?” asked Field.
“What news?”
“DredgerCorp’s announcement? I only just heard about it myself,” said Field. “When I was outside chatting, waiting for them to get done working you over.”
“What was it about?”
“You can get to it on the feed,” said Field. “Tap in and take a look.”
He logged in to the newsfeed. There it was, DredgerCorp News Conference. He opened it up.
William Tanner the man’s name was. Altman didn’t think he’d ever seen him before. There’s been a lot of speculation about this strange vid clip, he said, and then showed a longer version of the clip that Bennett had shown Altman. I wish I could say it was a hoax, but I’m afraid I can’t. In any case, gentlemen, I’m here to try to provide some clarity.
He went on to recount a story about an experimental submarine with a drilling mechanism, which had been commandeered and then sunk deep into the heart of Chicxulub. They were calling on the military to help them retrieve the submarine. His delivery alternated between confident and nervous. At the end, he claimed that DredgerCorp is committed to finding out what went on in that submarine and why, and making sure it never happens again. Then, ignoring the reporters trying to question him, he strode quickly off the stage.
Altman finished watching and then watched again. Definitely blood, he thought, upon seeing the extended vid fragment. He had to admit that what William Tanner was saying sounded plausible. It answered most of the questions he’d had. The only loose ends it left were why the pilot had commandeered the submarine and taken it. Though maybe it was enough to simply declare that to be madness.
In any case, it sounded good.
Indeed, it almost sounded too good to be true.
Or am I trying to make something out of nothing? he wondered.
Maybe he should just forget about it, let it go. One man was already dead, and he might end up dead, too, if he wasn’t careful. Maybe Hammond had simply been killed in a mugging gone wrong and it had nothing to do with events in the Chicxulub crater.
He thought it over, then went back and watched the press conference again. On one side of the scale were the claims the press conference had made. On the other was the pulse from the center of the crater. No matter how you looked at it, the pulse had started well before the incident with the submarine. The submarine hadn’t started the pulse, but maybe whatever happened on board had been what had strengthened the signal. Maybe it was all coincidence or maybe it was a big mistake on his part, but he wasn’t yet ready to give up.
· · ·
When he arrived home, Ada still wasn’t there. He felt again the same brief thrill of panic he’d experienced when he thought earlier that something had happened to her. He tried to call her again, still got no response.
He waited nervously for her, one hour and then two. He tried to call again, then again, still no answer. What if something’s happened to her? he couldn’t help but think, even though another part of his mind knew it was nonsense, that Ada often worked late, that there was no good reason yet to assume something was wrong.
But when the door finally opened, he was close to hysteria. He started toward her, ready to berate her, when he saw she wasn’t alone. She had somebody with her. A young boy.
The boy was holding her hand delicately. He started to ask her where she’d been, but she silenced him with a look. “Michael,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Chava.”
Altman looked down at the boy. He was young, either not yet or just barely a teenager. He was barefoot, wearing a threadbare but clean T-shirt and a pair of shorts hanging barely together. He was very thin. He had deep brown eyes and a slightly apprehensive look.
“Chava,” Altman said. “What sort of name is that?”
“It’s a nickname for Salvador,” said Ada quickly. When Altman gave her a look, she nodded. “I know it doesn’t sound like it, but it’s true,” she said.
“Really?” he said, and turned to the boy.
The boy nodded, but said nothing.
Altman looked to Ada for help, for some clue as to what was going on. “I thought you might like to talk to him,” she said.
“Would you like to sit down?” he asked Chava.
The boy hesitated and then nodded. Altman pulled out a chair for him, and he climbed onto it.
“Would you like something to eat?” Altman asked.
The boy nodded again. Altman opened the fridge and started to look through it, then changed his mind. “Come on,” he said to the boy. “Look in here. Take anything you want.”
The boy approached the fridge as if it were a trap. He carefully bent his head around the door and looked in, then looked up at Altman.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Anything,” said Altman.
A few minutes later he had most of the contents of the fridge piled on the table in front of him. He was tasting everything. He’d take a small bite of something, move it around in his mouth, swallow it, and then move on to the next item.
“What would you like to talk about?” asked Altman once he was done.
The boy shook his finger at him. “The lady,” he said. “She is the one who said you wanted to speak with me.”
“Do you think you could tell him the same story you told me?” asked Ada.
“This is not a story,” Chava said with a frown. “It happened for real.”
“Yes, of course,
Chava,” said Ada quickly. “That’s what I meant.”
“Okay, I will tell it,” the boy said. “I was walking on the beach, very early morning. This was a day when in my head I thought, I will walk on the beach and turn to go to town and then I will see if there is anyone who needs messages delivered. Sometimes you, the scientists, will give me a little money to deliver messages. Sometimes, after two or three messages it is enough to buy a polvorón or an oreja at the pastelería.
“But this day, my feet wanted to go the other way. I could not stop them. So, instead of going in to the town, we went together out farther along the deserted beach. That is when I found something.”
“What did you find?” asked Altman.
“I do not know,” said the boy.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean that there is not a name for what I found. It was like a man but it was not a man. It was also like a balloon but it was not a balloon.”
“How can it be like both a man and a balloon?” asked Altman.
“Yes,” said the boy, and smiled. “This is exactly what I asked myself. I can see that you understand my story. The lady was good to bring me to tell it to you. It made a noise, too. Like this.”
The boy leaned over the table and began to make a strange wheezing sound.
“The bruja told me to burn it, that it was a flea from the tail of the devil. Chicxulub.” He crossed his middle and index fingers over each other and held his hand up for them to see. “But later . . . I found out she was dead.”
“How could she tell you if she was dead?” asked Altman.
“It is like you are inside my head and seeing what I was asking myself,” said the boy gleefully.
Altman waited for the boy to go on, but he didn’t say anything further.
“You burned it?” he said.
“Yes,” said the boy. “It burned very nice.”
“What part of it was like a balloon?” asked Altman.
“Its back,” said the boy without hesitation. “There were the gray sacks.” He touched a cucumber on the table that he had taken a bite of. “May this come with me?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Altman.
The cucumber disappeared into his clothes. He touched an onion and made a face.
“Can I ask you something?” asked Altman.
Chava nodded.
“Would you take us there, to the place where you found it?”
The boy looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you promise me that if you see me and you have a message to send that you will choose me to send it?”
“What?” asked Altman, startled. “Yes, of course.”
“This is good,” said the boy. “And may I take three more things from the table, but not the onion?”
Altman nodded, trying to hide his smile. Chava slipped three things into his shirt so quickly that Altman was not entirely sure what he had.
“Now I will take you there,” the boy said firmly.
28
Tanner poured himself a glass of whiskey and fell back against the pillows. Finally he was going to get a good night’s sleep on a good bed. Between setting up the Chicxulub office, the arrangements to get the bathyscaphe and Hennessy and Dantec to Mexico, the time spent on the freighter, the agonizing hours trying to figure out what was going on inside the bathyscaphe and all the worry afterward, it seemed like it had been months since he had had a decent night’s sleep.
He sipped his whiskey. The key, he told himself, was not to think about it. The key was to relax. It was all over now. The press conference was done. The next stages of the operation had not yet begun.
His personal phone rang. He looked at it. If it was his wife, her name would come up. No name came up. Which meant it could be President Small or maybe Terry, Tim, and Tom. They were the only ones who had his number, except for Dantec. And Dantec was dead.
“Hello?” he said.
“William Tanner?” said a mellifluous voice. “I have a few questions for you about Dr. Hennessy’s death.”
“How did you get this number?” asked Tanner. “This is a private number.”
The man ignored him. “Was there really no sign of instability before the descent? Didn’t DredgerCorp’s safety procedures fail you in this case? Or should I say failed Hennessy and the late Mr. Dantec?”
Tanner clicked off. After a few seconds, the phone rang again.
“Hello!” said Tanner.
“Please don’t hang up, Mr. Tanner. There are important ethical issues at—”
He disconnected. He turned the telephone all the way off, left it sitting on his bedside table. If Small or the Colonel wanted to get in touch, they’d have to contact him by vid.
He took a big sip, felt the whiskey burn down his throat. He tried to relax, to empty his mind, to let himself go. He could relax now, he told himself. The phone was off; the door was locked. Finally, he could relax.
But he couldn’t relax. His head was throbbing and something was gnawing at him.
He got up and swallowed three sleeping pills, washing them down with whiskey. He stared at his face for a long moment in the mirror and then climbed back into the bed.
The problem was that he agreed with the reporter. There were ethical issues at stake, things that had been done that, despite everything else he had done at DredgerCorp over the years, he was having difficulty living with.
He’d been on operations where people had died before. He’d even been on operations when they’d died as a direct result of choices he had made. Not to mention the trauma of the moon skirmishes, where everyone had done terrible things and where on more than one occasion he’d felt less than human. But these two had died and he still didn’t understand why. Was it because instead of corpses that he could see and make sense of, all he had were brief, staticky images? Did he just need a little more finality? Or was it more than that?
There had been no sign of instability in Hennessy before the descent. He ran over their interactions in his head again. In his mind, if anybody had been in danger of becoming unstable, it was Dantec. Was it possible that Dantec had snapped first and that had made Hennessy snap?
The whiskey and the sleeping pills were finally starting to take effect. Things had begun to blur. Maybe there would be answers when they brought the bathyscaphe back to the surface, he thought. Maybe that would explain everything.
He was startled awake by the telephone ringing. He groped it off the nightstand and looked at the display.
The name that came up was Dantec.
His heart leapt into his throat and he was suddenly wide awake. Dantec was dead; he couldn’t be the one calling. He stared at the display: it still read Dantec.
He sat up in bed, put his feet on the floor. “Hello?” he said, facing the wall. “Who is this?”
But there was only static on the other end of the line.
He waited, feeling like he might pass out. “Dantec,” he said tentatively. “Are you alive?”
He stayed with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening. At some point he realized there wasn’t even static. The phone wasn’t even turned on.
He put the phone back on the nightstand. Immediately, even though it wasn’t on, it rang again. Dantec’s name came up on the display.
“Hello?” Tanner said.
There was only silence.
He put the phone back down again. When it rang this time, he just stayed there, watching it ring. It’s off, he tried to tell himself. It can’t be ringing. But the damned thing kept ringing.
Aren’t you going to answer it? said a voice from behind him, a voice he recognized.
He felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck. Very slowly, he turned. There was a vague shape in the bed with him that, as he looked at it, slowly became human. Crude and awkward features became more and more refined until it was, at last, Dantec. His skin was very white, almost bloodless. His lips had turned blue.
“You’re not real,” said Tanner.
Aren’t I
? said Dantec. Then why are you seeing me?
“But you died, in the bathyscaphe.”
Are you sure it was me? asked Dantec. Are you sure I was even in the bathyscaphe?
Tanner hesitated. “Are you still alive?” he asked.
I’m here, aren’t I?
Tanner just shook his head.
Go ahead and touch me, said Dantec. If I’m not real, you wouldn’t be able to touch me.
Tanner closed his eyes and reached out. At first he felt only the bed, the blanket. Then he reached a little farther and felt something different, something that moved, something alive. “It is you,” said Tanner, smiling. “I can’t believe it. How did you survive? What are you doing here?”
I’ve come to see you, said Dantec. Can’t a guy stop by to see an old friend?
“Sure,” said Tanner.
Also. . . .
“What is it, Dantec? You can tell me.”
I hate to ask, Tanner, but I need your help. I need something from you.
“Anything,” said Tanner. “What’s mine is yours.”
I’m having a hard time breathing, said Dantec. I need you to share your oxygen tank with me.
“How can I do that?”
Just make a slit in the breathing tube, said Dantec. I’ll cut mine off a few feet down and then we’ll splice them together. Then we can both breathe.
“I don’t—” I don’t have a breathing tube, he had started to say. But then he reached up and felt it; there it was.
I don’t have much longer, said Dantec. Indeed his lips looked even bluer than they had looked just a few moments before.
“I need something sharp,” Tanner said. “Where can I find something sharp?”
There’s a pocketknife in the drawer of the nightstand, said Dantec.
“How do you know what’s in my nightstand?”
I’m full of surprises, said Dantec, and smiled, his blue lips stretching and turning white.
Tanner got the pocketknife out and unfolded the biggest blade. “Where should I cut it?” he asked.
Anywhere, said Dantec, as long as the cut’s long enough. Remember, make it long.
Tanner nodded. “Ready?” he asked.
Ready, said Dantec.
He made a long horizontal cut, almost cutting the tube right in half. “All right,” Tanner said, “quickly, hand it to me.”
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