The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  So, I asked the Horse from whose mouth came all these sundry marvels, I asked him, “If these attacks are random, then what good’s a fallout shelter?” And he comes right back at me, whiz-bang, with the news that, somehow or another, those assholes have gone and weaponized the hounds. Sure, he was on beyond hazy on the details, though you can bet your sainted Aunt Beulah’s fat tukhus I did pry. All he would say was, “There’s some people, see, got a natural affinity (italics mine) for Tindalos. There’s some people born predisposed, kinda like a living, breathing, walking, talking, shitting dog whistle what only these things can hear.”

  I know, right?

  But dude, that’s what I’m saying here. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, okay? If there’s talent like that in the world, you can just forget goddamn sniper rifles and remote-triggered explosive devices, fucking MQ-9 Reaper drones and 007 umbrellas that inject deadly ricin micro-doses. You can forget Vladimir Putin and his fancy-ass radioactive fucking aerosolized polonium-210. Dude, you can forget all that shit. You can kiss it goodbye, because if my friend Harry the Horse knows of what he speaks, well, it’s a new damn ball of wax, ain’t it? It’s the dawn of a new day, and we stand at the threshold of a veritable golden age of executive action and extreme prejudice. That’s what I’m saying, dig?

  If the hounds do their bidding? Shit.

  What a fantastic death abyss, indeed.

  But, like the fox said to the mama chicken, it all comes down, of course, to who you’re gonna believe.

  Jesus, just lookit the time, will you . . .

  14.: Strangers When We Meet (High & Dry)

  (Atlanta, January 9, 2011)

  And here is the long night before three Georgia cops find a dead shark hanging in an abandoned warehouse, and, just like almost every single time before, the Signalman and Ellison Nicodemo didn’t actually plan on sex. But tomorrow Albany’s trap at the High Museum of Art is scheduled to be sprung, and, as they say, tensions are high and any port in a storm and so on. After their flight touched down at Dobbins ARB, after the drive into the city from Marietta to the Kirkwood safehouse, there was a perfunctory, picked-over meal from some local burger joint called Zesto, grease and ketchup and French fries. When they’d eaten, she disappeared into the bathroom for fifteen minutes, while he finished off the bottle of J&B that he’d been nursing since they left New York that morning. And then, as if by some silent consent, they ended up together in the squeaky little bed, the Signalman clumsy and halting as always, a little too drunk to fuck, Ellison a breathless flurry of desperation and violent intensity. He tasted of Scotch and she tasted of fast-food onions and apprehension. When she tried to slip his left middle finger up her ass, the Signalman hesitated, and he’ll have bruises to show for it in the morning. Ellison comes first, just like almost every single time before, and just like always she comes quiet as the tomb. No rowdy, boisterous orgasms for Ellison Nicodemo, Secret Weapon X in Dreamland’s arsenal of super-classified toys and covert gadgetry, just gritted teeth and the sudden shudder of her narrow hips. Then, without a word, she climbs off him and goes to the bathroom to take a piss and a quick hot shower and to fix, leaving the Signalman alone to burp the worm for himself if he wants closure.

  He doesn’t bother. Instead, he gets up, pulls on his boxers and a mostly clean T-shirt, then cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of J&B. He switches on the lamp beside the bed and reads a few pages from a week-old issue of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, waiting to see if she’s coming back, not expecting that she will. She has her own room, after all.

  But she does come back, and now, half an hour later, Ellison is sitting naked near the foot of the bed, her back pressed against the wall, legs crossed in a sloppy half-lotus position. Her hair is wet and slicked back from her face. She’s smoking her Chesterfield and staring at the wide olive-green blackboard that takes up almost an entire side of the room. Some joker’s scrawled MR. SPOCK SAYS RELAX in hot pink chalk. Despite her drooping eyelids, Ellison isn’t quite nodding, isn’t quite so fucked up that she’s entirely beyond the capacity for casual conversation, so long as they stay in the shallow end of the pool. She points at the graffiti with her cigarette and asks, “Did this used to be a school or what?”

  “Yeah,” the Signalman replies, sipping his Scotch from a paper cup and watching her. “From 1922 until about ten years back, when it closed up and we bought the place. Remind me in the morning, and I’ll show you where there’s a map of the whole entire United States painted on the asphalt in the parking lot. Every state’s done up in a different color.”

  “Okay, I’ll remind you,” she says, knowing full well that she won’t.

  “Anyway, I figure resource management will hang on to this dump a few more years, then it’ll be sold off for condominiums or some shit. Urban pioneering. Gentrification.” The way he says gentrification, it’s the sort of tone someone else might reserve for a word like leprosy. He finishes his drink and pours another. “You doing okay over there, kiddo?”

  In preference to a yea or nay, and only slurring slightly, Ellison asks him, “You really think she’s gonna show tomorrow? You think she’s really gonna fall for this?”

  The Signalman shrugs and rubs his eyes. “The big brains behind the yellow door seem to think so. Me, I’m gonna stick to my usual wait-and-fucking-see approach. If she doesn’t, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. There are exigency protocols. If she does show, though, you’re gonna be ready, right? You and Mr. White Fang?”

  “I had a dream last night,” Ellison tells him, leaving the question unanswered.

  “Oh yeah? Anything I should be worried about?”

  “I had a dream about a flood,” she replies. “I had a dream about drowning. So, you tell me. Are you worried?”

  The Signalman stops rubbing at his smarting eyes and wishes his Visine weren’t all the way across the room in his suitcase. He starts to ask Ellison if she’ll get it for him, then thinks better of it. He knows that look. Right now, she’s in the sweet spot and probably not up for the hike there and back again.

  Ellison licks her dry lips and takes another pull on her cigarette.

  “You dreamed you were drowning in a flood,” says the Signalman. “Not to sound dismissive, but, all things considered, that’s just about the least surprising thing I’ve heard all day.”

  Ellison stops staring at the chalkboard and looks up at the ceiling.

  “In my dream the water was the color of rust,” she says. “And I was running out of breath, trying to get back to the surface, only when I finally did, it was like hitting a pane of glass or plexi or something. You were on the other side, on your hands and knees, looking down at me. You had a claw hammer, and you kept hitting the surface of the water, but it wouldn’t break, no matter how hard you tried. The hammer just kept bouncing off. You looked afraid, and you were moving your lips, like you were trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear you. I just heard my heart, getting slower and slower.”

  “Well, okay,” says the Signalman, “that’s pretty fucking god-awful,” and he lights a Camel and blows a couple of smoke rings at the cold Georgia night waiting on the other side of the tall, boarded-up windows. “Maybe we should talk about something else. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” Ellison replies. “I was just thinking about it in the shower, that’s all. I was just thinking about the dream and wondering whether or not she’ll show.”

  “Well, like I said, DIRD thinks so, and they’re more often right than not. We know how badly she wants the Syrian dingus. At this point, it’s pretty much Jehosheba’s holy goddamn grail, the one missing piece in her grand eschatological jigsaw puzzle, and this is the first time it’ll have seen the light of day since Albany got their mitts on that ugly hunk of rock back in the seventies. But hey, if she doesn’t show, well, it won’t be the first time I’ve been left holding my dick, now will it?” And he winks at her.

  Ellison laughs. He hasn’t heard her laugh in days, so at least there’s t
hat.

  “But I think she’ll be there,” he says. “And we’ve got five crack sharpshooters are gonna be awfully disappointed if she isn’t. I mean, if you need them.”

  “If I need them,” Ellison nods.

  “I’m just saying, they’ll have your back, if it comes to that.”

  Ellison Nicodemo makes a gun with her thumb and index finger and mimes shooting at him. Bang, bang, bang. Then she stubs out the butt of her cigarette against the safehouse wall, leaving a jagged black smear across the off-white paint. “Was it also the wonks behind the yellow door who decided Jehosheba’s actually inclined to worry about snipers and Mk 21 rifles?”

  The Signalman frowns and sips his whiskey. “I ain’t yet seen any evidence put forth to indicate the bitch is invulnerable to having her brains blown out by a .338 Norma Magnum cartridge, so how about let’s not start in thinking that maybe she is. When all’s said and done, Jehosheba’s just another deluded patsy playing Stepin Fetchit for some prehistoric sonofabitch too lazy or conceited or—fortunately for us—hamstrung to do his own damn dirty work. But you get it in your head maybe she’s more than that, well, you know better, Ellison. You know that’s the worst and greatest power she’s got.”

  “Then maybe you don’t even need the hound this time,” says Ellison, still staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling.

  “Maybe not, but that’s how Albany says this thing’s gonna happen, so that’s how its gonna happen. If it amounts to swatting a fly with a bulldozer, then so be it. Just so long as the fly gets swatted, no one’s worrying about overkill.”

  Ellison sighs and licks her lips again. She’s about to suggest that just possibly she and Jehosheba aren’t so different, not in the final analysis, not when push comes to shove. Different masters, that’s all. Same sorry puppet show. But she doesn’t, because what’s the fucking point. She looks over at the Signalman and squints at the lamplight.

  “And what if we do kill her,” Ellison says, “but we’re too late, or it just doesn’t matter and killing her isn’t enough to stop what she’s set in motion? You think all the slide rules and pocket protectors have that covered, too?”

  “I think you should try and get some sleep,” he tells her. “However this plays out, tomorrow’s gonna be a long day and I need you on the qui vive.”

  Ellison nods, and then she goes away to find her own bed. There are three other agents just down the hall, in case she gets lost. And the Signalman sits on the edge of the squeaky mattress in the old schoolroom that smells like sex and sweat, mold and chalk dust and stale tobacco smoke, and he thinks about monsters and wonders exactly when it got so easy for him to play roulette with other people’s lives.

  15.: Another Toe in the Ocean

  (Providence, October 31, 2017)

  Whatever Mackenzie Regan had expected of the Signalman, it wasn’t the man she now found sitting in the diner booth across from her. Her father, a second-generation Minnesota horse farmer, would say this was a man who looked like he’d been rode hard and put up wet. Mackenzie, never given to Midwestern barnyard idioms, would simply say that he looks spent, in just about every way that a man entering late middle age can look spent, from the bruised insomniac’s bags beneath his eyes to the beginnings of a proper drinker’s nose. His black suit is wrinkled and dingy. There’s dandruff on his shoulders and nicotine stains on his fingers and nails and teeth. His hair gives the impression that it hasn’t so much gone grey as simply given up on the whole idea of color. He’s a lot thinner than she expected.

  Mackenzie was recruited just three years back, straight out of Quantico, and she’s still (as her father would say) wet behind the ears, but the Signalman, he’s a legend. And, she reminds herself, there are few things as sobering as meeting a legend who fails to measure up. Whatever she’d expected of the man who finally pushed the button at Deer Isle in 2012 and was boots on the ground at the Moonlight Ranch event, this wasn’t it. Best not to count your chickens before they hatch, as her father would say.

  “Hell of a blow last night,” says the Signalman and dumps a stream of sugar into his coffee cup from the glass-and-stainless-steel dispenser. The cream he pours in afterwards swirls like a tiny white galaxy, a logarithmic clockwise spiral reminding her there’s no such thing as mundane. “On the radio, I heard there were gusts to a hundred and thirty miles per hour up in New Hampshire. I heard there’s more than sixty thousand people here in Rhode Island without electricity this morning.” He has a slight Southern drawl, Tennessee or Georgia or Alabama maybe. Someone once told her he was from Birmingham.

  “Welcome to New England,” she says and smiles and watches as the Signalman stirs his coffee. “Happy Halloween.”

  He smiles back, sort of, nods his head, and gazes past her at the morning traffic out on Westminster Street. “Kept me up most of the night,” he says. “I’ve never cared for the wind, truth be told. I’ve never much cared for the sea, either. But it is a rare day when the world sits up, rolls over, and complies with our heart’s desires. We go where we’re told.”

  “Yes sir,” she says.

  “You had your breakfast yet?” he asks, and she tells him that no, she hasn’t. “Well then, we’ll eat in a bit,” he says. “I just want to get a couple of the necessary unpleasantries out of the way first.” And then he reaches into his jacket and takes out an old photograph, a glossy color 4×6 printed on Kodak paper. He slides it across the table to her. A waitress shows up and asks if Mackenzie wants coffee. She says she does, and the waitress goes away again.

  “I know they’ve already sent some stuff over,” says the Signalman, “but not this. This is the sort of thing I prefer not to trust to couriers.”

  “Yes sir,” Mackenzie says again. “Of course,” and she picks up the photograph. For whatever reason, she looks at the backside first. The paper has started to turn yellow around the edges and there’s sloppy handwriting scrawled in blue ballpoint pen—7/21/75 Marquardt fétiche, Perth. Then she turns it over and looks at the front. She’s already seen a lot of ugly in her three short, hard years with Albany, because ugly comes with the job, but none of it has prepared her for the thing in the photograph. She glances up at the Signalman, then back down at the picture. “I think I know what this is,” she tells him.

  The Signalman sips at his sweet, pale coffee, then stops watching the traffic and watches her, instead. “Yeah, I figured you might,” he says. “You were the trigger for that surveillance team on the op down in Fall River last year, right?”

  Mackenzie Regan licks her lips. Her mouth has gone dry.

  “The Buffum Chace whatsit,” says the Signalman. “That mess with the cultists. You were on that team, correct?”

  She sets the photo on the table, resisting the urge to hand it back to him or turn it face down so she won’t have to see the thing.

  “This is supposed to be Mother Hydra, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “That’s what they tell me,” he replies and runs the fingers of his right hand through his weary, colorless hair. The waitress brings Mackenzie’s coffee and asks if they’re ready to order. The Signalman tells her no—soon, but not yet. She doesn’t seem to notice the photograph lying on the table in front of Mackenzie. The waitress says she’ll check back in a bit, then leaves, and the Signalman returns to watching the traffic on Westminster.

  “At the old house in Fall River,” says Mackenzie, “there was something painted on one of the walls. I think it was meant to be this. Didn’t really do it justice, though.”

  “Hell of a thing, ain’t it? About yea big,” and he makes a fist to indicate the figure’s size. “Near as anyone can guess, it was made in Assyria during the late Bronze Age, carved from a hunk of iron sulfide that most likely formed in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent.”

  Mackenzie ignores her coffee and picks up the photograph again. She knows better, but tells herself it’s only her imagination playing tricks that makes the paper feel oily and somehow unclean.

  “You know anything about hydrothermal
vents, Agent Regan?”

  “Not really, no. I mean, nothing much beyond what you pick up from reading National Geographic and watching PBS.”

  “So you might not know there are hydrothermal vents other places besides Earth. Europa, for instance. And Enceladus. That’s the planet Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.”

  Before she thinks better of it, Mackenzie Regan tells the Signalman she knows what Enceladus is, that she had an astronomy course in college. He just nods and drinks his coffee and watches the cars on the other side of the plate-glass windows.

  “All right then, Professor,” he says, “do you also know there are scientists who think Mars used to have hydrothermal vents, way back about three and a half billion years ago, when maybe there was a Martian ocean?”

  “No,” she tells him. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, turns out, there are. And here’s the kicker. If our planetologists and geochemists and whatnot are to be believed, the dingus in that picture was made from a piece of iron that formed in a hydrothermal vent on Mars and then, billions of years later, fell to Earth as a meteorite that landed somewhere in Mesopotamia. That’s in—”