Among them was Frank Ramon, chief of police. He paced restlessly in front of his van, looking bewildered and twirling his baton. Christine stood opposite. She seemed to be explaining something.
It had been a mistake what had happened, Lota told herself firmly. That was all. Kurtz had warned them—she’d done her best. “This Army existed before you and will continue to exist long after you are gone.” They’d repeated this all together, in unison. Lota herself had said the words out loud, had learned them by rote, had repeated them in dreams.
Perhaps, it occurred to her now, what had happened to Verbal—what was happening to all of them now—was a sort of punishment: for having so simply, so unthinkingly, repeated the words.
But then she caught herself. What had happened was not something that had happened to her, to them. It was just something that had happened.
The van door had been left open and Lota clambered in.
A simple mistake! That’s what their lives amounted to—in the scheme of things, and after the fact…
The van’s engine bumped, then roared.
Lota recalled Verbal’s face. The way the tension had slackened between them. How the dark parts of his eyes had slipped below the white parts.
“I’ll get help,” she’d said. Then she’d walked through the door, down the stairs. Had pressed Dial. She’d stepped through the embassy door, had felt purified by the sun.
The van lurched forward. “Turn back!” Lota shrieked. But her mouth stayed firmly closed. No sound escaped.
It was too late. Again, she recalled the whites of Verbal’s eyes. And yet—it was wrong to leave him. It was—
Don’t think, Lota thought.
The engine moaned. They were climbing the only hill on the island.
This was not a time to think. Why else had they run everything through so many times in their minds? So they didn’t have to think. So the whole thing would happen the way blinking happened, or swallowing. Or ducking your head to avoid a blow.
Later, there would be time to think. Later, there would be all the time in the world.
A pop startled her, followed by a fizzing sound. Norma had cracked open a can of soda. She took a long sip, then passed it to Joker, who passed it—with an apologetic smile—to Lota. She drank thirstily.
SIX
With the first shout, something inside Rachel stood up on end like the hair of a dog.
She’d just known, she wasn’t sure how. She’d felt it; had flown to the window. But she saw nothing out of the ordinary out there. The cracked pavement of the embassy walk was deserted. The lawn looked like it had never been walked on at all. Across the street, Bo Brown staggered in a familiar pattern, on his way either to or from Josie’s canteen. A white van parked on the side of the road had its door rolled back, but there didn’t appear to be anyone inside.
Rachel wasn’t like Ray—someone who was nearly always “sensing” something wrong when nothing was, in fact, wrong at all. She was more practical than that, and proud of it.
Ray couldn’t help it, of course. He’d been brought up—as Rachel used to like to say—to “make the worst of everything.”
In the beginning, she’d said it fondly; she’d loved being the one to swoop in and set things right. This was no doubt on account of her own upbringing. She’d inherited a sort of compulsive optimism and, though she claimed not to abide by any generalized code, it felt immoral to her not to at least believe that things were going to turn out all right. In the beginning, whenever Ray voiced his worry over what seemed, to Rachel, like the most trivial things, she would laugh. “You!” she’d say, touching his face. “Stop your worrying, you.”
But then her voice would deepen slightly, in the way that it always did when she either more or less literally meant business. “First of all,” she’d say, counting it off on a thumb, “it’s not a rational response, worry. It’s a leftover flight response, a residual animal instinct.” It was possible that, at one time, Rachel may have enjoyed attributing residual animal instincts to Ray, but once they were married, and especially after Zoe was born, his habit of turning what seemed to her to be completely innocuous situations into potential life threats had begun to strike her as cowardly and insecure.
And yet it had been Rachel, not Ray, who’d insisted on leaving the island. In this particular case, she’d protested, the threat was not imagined but real. Unlike Ray, she’d always had an instinctive sense of the difference.
“You know,” she’d said to him one day shortly after they met, “you can bring things on yourself if you think about them too hard.” They’d been studying together for the officers’ exam and he’d just betrayed himself for the first time by cataloguing all the quite-nearly-but-not-entirely-impossible ways things could go wrong. “It’s like you create the possibility of bad things happening,” she’d said seriously, “just by thinking that they might.” Then, having sensed she’d veered embarrassingly toward the metaphysical, she’d corrected herself by adding: “It’s been scientifically proven. There’s all these studies on negative thinking. You can actually measure the effects.”
After Zoe was born—when real threats began, for both of them, to take on a more definite shape—Rachel had found herself less and less tolerant of Ray’s imagined ones. She reminded him often that even infants “absorbed everything”; they both needed to be careful, she said, if they didn’t want Zoe to grow up as Ray had—afraid of every little thing.
Ray didn’t ever argue, exactly. Not even during those incredibly stressful months when Rachel’s own, very real worry had driven them all nearly over the brink. His strategy was instead to turn her words against her. “But why create these possibilities, Rachel?” he’d said to her just last week, for example, when Rachel—despite her better judgment—had expressed concern over the future of both their careers. “Why project yourself like that into a future you actively hope will never arrive?”
Rachel hadn’t let him gloat for long. “Oh let’s not pretend this is suddenly my problem,” she’d said.
Later, though, unable to let the subject drop, she added: “But I wonder if there isn’t, after all, in your own worry and projection, some sort of perverse desire for the shit to really hit the fan? You know, fire and brimstone and all that. Yes. Maybe…” (Her voice had quickened slightly; now that the ball was in her court again, she was beginning to have a little fun.) “Maybe you haven’t got quite as far away from all that as both of us would like to suppose. Maybe, deep down, you’re still waiting for everything—and everyone—to quite literally go to hell!”
This time Ray went so silent on the other end of the line that it wasn’t even silence anymore.
“Ray!” she had shouted after a thunderous moment or two. “Ray, come on! I’m joking!”
Of course she’d been joking. And yet for some reason her words came back to her now as she stood staring out the window of her third-floor office at the absolutely-nothing that was happening outside.
There was another shout. A door banged. Rachel heard a clatter of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
Maybe it was she and not Ray who’d been waiting for the shit to really hit the fan—and maybe this was it (her heart collided with the back of her chest): the thing that, without even knowing it, she’d been waiting for.
She grabbed the heavy receiver of the office phone. It was halfway to her ear before she wondered who on earth she was going to call. The ambassador’s office was just a few doors from her own; she could be there in fifteen seconds if she wished to speak to him.
But what good would it do to speak to the ambassador?
A series of muffled screams reverberated in the hall. Every one of Rachel’s nerves stood up on end. She dialed headquarters. If the decision turned out to be rash, she counselled herself as she pushed the buttons on her phone, she could certainly not be blamed at this point for jumping to conclusions.
But another shout interrupted these thoughts, and in the same moment the ringing stopped; the line clic
ked.
“Hello?” she said. Because of the shout she’d missed the “hello” from the other end and was at first not altogether certain if there was actually anyone on the line.
“Yes,” the response came. “Hello? Hello?”
“Hello!” Rachel almost shouted. She was so relieved at having made contact with someone—anyone—that for a full second or two she was unable to speak.
“Yes—hello. Can I help you?”
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Rachel finally managed. “I’m not sure if you’re already aware—” (Why did she feel the need to make room for the possibility that it was she who was ignorant or mistaken, not the person she addressed?)
The clatter of footsteps on the stairs had grown louder. They’d reached the third floor. She could hear them pounding almost directly outside of her door.
“Who am I speaking with?”
“Rachel,” Rachel hissed. Her heart was beating so quickly now that it felt as if her rib cage might explode. “Rachel Darling. I’m reporting what appears to be a sort of—general attack. I’m not exactly sure of the nature, but if you could please alert—”
A shot. Jesus. Coming from—where? Not far, certainly. Rachel had felt it rather than heard it. Next door, even? Could it have been that close?
“Ma’am? Mrs.…Darling? Ma’am?”
“An attack!” Rachel said. Her voice was nearly strangled now, with impatience and fear. “There’s—there’s shots being fired!”
Two more shots rang out then in such quick succession that Rachel didn’t hear the response from whomever it was she was speaking to. The door opened and a young woman in a football jersey burst in. She was bug-eyed, scrawny. She looked like an addict, Rachel thought. Except that her eyes, rather than glazed and dull-seeming, were steady and hard. But it was strange. The girl was standing directly in front of Rachel, looking right at her, and it was as if she didn’t even see her. Was it possible, Rachel wondered, that she was somehow invisible to the girl? Was it possible—
But then she saw something flicker in the girl’s eye. She saw the girl’s hand drift toward her belt; saw her raise a gun…
“Shut up!” the girl screamed. Though no one had spoken.
Her head loomed strangely. Rachel looked at the gun. It was, she noticed, cocked at a slight angle. If it was trained on anything, it was on something behind and above Rachel rather than on Rachel herself. This seeming carelessness comforted her and she suddenly saw what was happening for what it was: a ridiculous bit of theatre, conducted by amateurs. Yes, it was of at least some comfort to Rachel to realize that, if this was the shit hitting the fan, it wasn’t going to be professional about it.
The realization did nothing, of course, to change the fact that a gun was being pointed, even if generally, in her direction, but now, at least, the young woman’s face had regained its normal proportions.
“Put the phone down!”
Rachel followed the girl’s gaze. The phone in her hand felt utterly remote to her now and, more because of this than the girl’s order, she dropped it. It made a sick, cracking sound as it made contact with the floor.
Even the fact that the girl was wielding a gun, for example, Rachel thought, indicated that she understood what she was up against—and who was ultimately in control. How, after all, Rachel wondered, could anyone, even for a moment, imagine they might be able to get away with this sort of thing?
And what was “this sort of thing,” anyway? Rachel studied the young woman’s face without being able to read its expression. What was she looking for? What did she think she stood to gain? And where—after she’d gained it—did she imagine she could hide?
If you followed the one main road on the island south it took you through town and deposited you at the fishing wharf. A few commercial trawlers bobbed lazily there; old men dropped lines, kids passed cigarettes or leapt carelessly off the end of the pier. If you followed it in the other direction, the road gave way to a dirt track about a quarter mile past the depot. In another mile, it ended abruptly at the gated entrance to Ø Com’s outer station. The station was unvisited even by most Ø Com staff, surrounded by concrete and barbed wire.
For a moment Rachel almost felt sorry for the girl. She must know, even now, that whatever she thought she was doing was over even before it had begun. That it was only a matter of time before the Empire swooped in to settle the whole thing.
The girl steadied her aim; Rachel’s confidence wavered. It occurred to her how very far away the island was from the capital. How long it would take for anyone to reach them.
With a jolt, she recalled a conversation she’d had with Phil Mercer shortly after she’d arrived. “Who’s to say,” Phil had said, “we don’t wake up tomorrow and the army’s taken over the cable?”
“But the island doesn’t have an army,” Rachel informed him.
“Right.” Phil grinned. “The police, then.”
Rachel looked back at him blankly.
“Well, someone with guns. Someone on this island has got to have guns,” Phil said. “And someone with guns—you’ll agree with me—could at least potentially take over the cable…”
Rachel had frowned at this skeptically—but nodded.
Phil let out a short loud laugh. “Well, if anyone ever tried anything like that…” he said and wiped the sweat that had begun to bead on his forehead with the back of his hand. “They wouldn’t, of course,” he added, “but if they did—if anyone ever broke into the main station and held the cable hostage or something crazy like that…” He flicked his wrist so that the sweat he’d collected spattered—a small but perceptible drop landing on the end of Rachel’s nose. “It wouldn’t,” he concluded with a shrug, “actually be that big a deal.”
The main station, Phil had gone on to explain, these days functioned primarily as a decoy. A few old connections still ran through it—local stuff only; nothing beyond the Pacific reef. It was the outer station, built in the mid-2000s, that now served as the access point for all the trans-Pacific lines.
When Rachel had visited the main station during the first week or so of her stay, it had still looked and felt like a big deal to her. There’d been a video monitor and a couple of stony-faced armed guards at the gate, and the technicians inside were always, apparently, on high alert. They spent the entire length of Rachel’s visit running back and forth between flashing red lights, though the young tech who toured her assured her that nothing was actually wrong.
“An alarm is a symptom,” he’d said, “an indication of a failed connection. It doesn’t indicate what caused the failure, though, and most of the time it isn’t anything very severe.”
The outer station eliminated this sort of guesswork, Phil told Rachel later. With the old station—because no single person understood the entire system—they’d been constantly either trying to prevent or recover from human error. But the new system (Phil winked), it understood itself! It solved its own problems—took efficiency to a whole new level.
“Well, no,” he’d admitted when Rachel pressed him, the station wasn’t, despite the rumours, entirely unmanned. Or at least it wasn’t yet. The planes Rachel had noticed taking off and landing at odd hours at the island’s north end were international specialists, he said. The system was just like any other computer system; it needed constant updating.
The blinds had not been drawn and Rachel squinted against the glare. The barrel end of the young woman’s gun came into sharp focus as she did so. For a brief, unsettling moment, Rachel felt as though she could see down its whole length.
Well, in any case, she thought, even if Phil’s unlikely fantasy was actually coming true and the young woman was after the cable, she was clearly no specialist. She probably had no idea that the main station handled only local traffic, that it consisted of only a few of the most inessential wires…
No, Rachel thought as she stared down the barrel of the girl’s gun, even if this bunch was after the cable, it was quite certain that they weren’t going to
get very far. The thought impressed her. It was remarkable, she considered, how calm she’d managed to remain. Despite how many times she’d argued that mere anxiety was neither a rational nor a worthwhile response to real or imagined danger, she would hardly have expected herself to react this way—or to remain so confident that it was the young woman, not her, who stood at that moment on the losing end of the gun.
The tension between them was as taut as a wire. Rachel was conscious of how it held them both—equally—in check; how restricted they were by the opposition between the brute force of single moments and the tedious cruelty of history; how, for both of them—in that particular, shared, instance—there was nothing to gain, as well as nowhere to retreat, nowhere to go.
But then the young woman stepped forward. The gun was, very definitely, pointed at Rachel now and the balance was thrown. Rachel felt only her utter inequivalence—and the absolute emptiness of her own hands.
She tried to dismiss the feeling, tried to regain the cool confidence she’d felt just moments before, but it was hard. Really, she told herself firmly, she’d done everything she possibly could—and at significant personal risk—in alerting the capital. There was no use dwelling on what she might have done otherwise, or on what would happen now. Besides, every practical consideration of the matter led her to the same conclusion: it was only a matter of time. Help would arrive—was even now on its way.
Yes, Rachel thought a little desperately, all of this would soon be no more than a brief, skewed memory—a titillating anecdote, or a half-remembered dream.
She even felt a flicker of pleasure at the thought of recounting the story at some future date. She could just see Ray—mouth open, eyes wide—a caricature, almost, of disbelief and genuine alarm.
He’d ask her to repeat the story endlessly after that—and to practically everyone they met. “Oh, and Rachel’s last week on the island was eventful, wasn’t it? Rachel—tell.” Rachel would be obliged to revisit the incident often—the story inevitably changing a little each time it got told. Ray would correct her sometimes, chiming in with the details—sometimes even fully taking over in order to tell it “properly” himself.
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