She hoped she was not already forgetting anything that would come in handy later. She cast back, but her mind felt blurry.
The shout, she thought. She needed to remember the shout. And the footsteps. The number of shots fired. She needed to remember the quiet, weirdly intimate moment she’d shared with the young woman—both of them held in check, equally, by the impossibility of executing their own power.
And how, for a moment, she’d nearly felt sorry for her. “Yes,” she would say to Ray. “I quite honestly did. I mean, if you really think about it. If you think about the absolute desperation involved in embarking on something of that sort—something so obviously, and from the outset, doomed to fail…
“And you know the sorriest thing,” she’d say on another occasion—out to dinner, this time, with friends. “The sorriest thing is that there’s absolutely nothing one can do.”
The conversation would proceed from there, beginning with the relative value of mediation and the possibilities of restorative justice, until at last they would all unhappily agree that the island’s biggest mistake had been its failure to recognize that it had already been lost.
Yes, it had been a mistake (they all “hated to say”) to resurrect the island in the first place—a mistake to have imagined it could have been simply reconstructed out of mortar and sand, the introduction of invasive, non-native species, and a hasty financial plan assembled from unsustainable sources. It had been a mistake to believe that a balance could be restored between the future and the past, when (just as Phil Mercer had said at the last meeting Rachel had attended with the Ø Com advisory board) “there’s only ever one way forward, every time.”
Phil had been sipping coffee from an insulated mug and jabbing at a map with his free hand. “If you draw a line from one coast to the next,” Phil said—his eyes darting between Rachel and the ambassador—“we’re smack dab in the centre every time. The future is us” (jab). “And it’s here” (jab). “And it’s now.”
The young woman lunged toward Rachel. Rachel closed her eyes. She felt the pressure of hard metal, then heard a sharp click.
“Wait!”
The sound of her own voice surprised her. She wondered why it was the first time it had occurred to her to speak out loud.
She opened her eyes. “I’m not at all sure what’s going on here,” she said, looking around, “but I can assure you, there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble if…”
Unfortunately, she sounded less like a first secretary who’d suddenly remembered that she was in charge and more like an exasperated mother—accustomed to being trampled upon.
The young woman yanked hard on the metal chain of the handcuffs. The sharp edges of the cuff dug into Rachel’s skin; her knees buckled.
“Get down,” the girl hissed.
“All right,” Rachel said weakly. She was already down.
But then, because she couldn’t help herself: “I’m telling you, though. You’re going to be sorry.”
The girl clicked the empty cuff open, threaded the chain behind the desk’s top drawer handle, then shut the cuff on Rachel’s free hand. Her wrists were pressed together now, her arms yanked up around her ears.
The girl’s gun was askew again, Rachel noticed, pointed somewhere between the window and the filing cabinet. But the way she was looking at Rachel, she might as well have had it pointed directly between her eyes. Whatever depth Rachel had detected in her before—a flicker of fear, or at least of uncertainty—was gone. She was nothing but surfaces now.
Rachel’s throat felt dry; she almost choked. She’d been stupid, she realized. Why couldn’t she have kept her big mouth shut? Why couldn’t she have just…played along?
But then the girl stepped back abruptly. Her eyes widened. She lowered her gun.
How much time had passed now? One hour? Three? It was impossible to tell. The way her arms were positioned, Rachel could see only the bottom corner of her watch. She’d have to wait until at least twenty past four before she’d know the time.
Of course, by then, all of this would be over. Surely, Rachel thought, her message had been received. Surely, immediate action had been ordered—the military police mobilized.
No doubt, she reasoned, time was passing for her much slower than it actually was. But still…
Again, Rachel strained to look at her watch, but neither the long hand nor the short hand was visible to her. She tried counting to sixty—just to remind herself how slow a minute could feel—but she got distracted before she even reached twenty-five.
Surely by now, though, at least an hour had passed…twice the time it would take a plane to…
But then, of course, they’d need time to assess the situation, to make a plan…And in the meantime?
Rachel yanked hard with her bound wrists against the desk drawer. The flesh smarted; she choked back a yell.
But it was a relief, she found, to begin to feel angry, rather than either smug or scared. Again she yanked against the desk—taking some pleasure this time in the way it made her wrists burn. Where was everyone? What was taking so long?
She took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. She simply had to wait. Could not permit herself to let her imagination get the better of her.
Pleased with the effect of such a reasonable train of thought, Rachel reflected that one really did achieve a different perspective on things when forced into such a difficult situation. She would tell Ray that. “Everything comes into focus,” she’d say. “It sounds like a cliché, but it really does. You can’t help but start to see things differently, to understand what matters.”
It’s not like memorizing the Operations Handbook, she’d add, or calculating known risks, or signing a waiver. It’s not about probability anymore—or even about possibility. It’s just about what is. Plain and simple.
“It may even be…” she’d reflect, “that it’s really only when you come face to face, not just with the possibility of death but with its absolute inevitability, that life becomes”—here she’d pause for emphasis, reach slowly across the table for Ray’s hand—“real.”
Ray’s hand would feel warm and familiar. She’d stroke it slowly, feel a pulse throbbing in the thumb and the wrist. “Rules and regulations,” she’d tell him, “even—or especially—the ones we learn by rote, simply no longer apply in extreme cases, it seems. There isn’t any could, there isn’t any should anymore.”
Outside, a motor gunned. There was a whoop. A screech of tires. Rachel’s thoughts scattered—her heart slammed heavily inside her chest.
What if…?
The idea dawned slowly at first, but then all at once it was upon her. What if, she thought, the insurgents simply don’t know what they’re up against? What if they don’t know that all of this—whatever “this” is—is doomed from the outset? A meaningless charade? There was, after all, no reason for them to be aware of what she herself barely knew: the extent of, and the reason behind, the island’s importance as both a strategic military base and a hub for global trade. There was no reason they shouldn’t imagine, therefore, that their little coup, or whatever it was, might pass beneath the radar. Why would anyone, they might think, kick up a fuss over what happened out here, on what was little more than a mound of reinforced concrete, adrift somewhere in the South Sea?
The thought chilled Rachel. She listened for more sounds from the street, but heard nothing. If this was not just an amateurish heist, she considered—a bunch of lunatics who’d bitten off a little more than they could chew—but people who actually believed they had a shot at something, she had a lot more to worry about than she’d originally thought.
She shifted slightly, leaning into the desk. Her mouth felt dry. She tried—and failed—to swallow.
SEVEN
The outer station had been built a year after Lota was born, and so, for as long as she could remember, it had been there, perched at the far northern tip of the island like a big dead bird. As kids they’d torn down the road on bikes only to pul
l up short in front of the huge metal gate with its sign that read, in black paint—more and more of which flaked away each year—“Authoriz Person Only Bey P nt.” A few video cams were mounted on thin poles and lined the gravel drive, so they always had the uncanny feeling that they were being watched whenever they drew near.
Lota had never in her life seen anyone at, or around, the station, and the rumour was that no one ever set foot there at all.
Who, then, was watching? And why? The question had often crossed her mind, but until she met Kurtz she’d never considered it for long. Aside from the gate and the video cams, there was nothing to see except a squat concrete building at the end of the short drive, a TV or radio tower, a helicopter landing pad, and patches of overgrown Mexican creeper. It was not much to incite the curiosity even of a child.
As far as she was aware, no one knew what happened at the outer station, or if they knew, they didn’t care. People bad-mouthed Ø Com any chance they got (every promise they’d ever made had been broken at least several times; where were the jobs? where was the new wharf? the road? the money for the hospital? the schools?), but they didn’t spend a lot of time speculating about what obviously didn’t concern them.
It wasn’t until Kurtz pointed toward the far northern tip of the island on the map one day—the only space on the map that had been left curiously blank—and said, “That’s our prize,” that Lota had paid much attention.
“They want us to believe that it doesn’t exist,” Kurtz had said. “They want to make the cable disappear the way they made the island disappear. But nothing ever really disappears. Nothing ever just goes away. It might get hidden! It might get buried somewhere, or disguised. But something is always there, and everything”—her eyes panned the room—“depends on something. The price of oil, for example! The Dow Jones industrial average! The security of at least half of the major intelligence organizations on this planet! Everything,” Kurtz said, “depends on a wireless system that has never actually been wireless! We are standing”—she raised her arms above her head and stared down at her feet, planted squarely on the basement floor—“on the last remaining land access point for one of the largest and most expensive cable systems in the entire world. In another year or two, who knows? Maybe even this point will be plunged underground. But for now”—she shook her head slowly—“we open the gates of the outer station and we’re practically tripping over it. For now we still have a chance. We have a point of entrance, of disruption—and therefore of negotiation. Of power!”
“Very few people seem to get this,” Lota remembered Kurtz saying once, soon after she’d joined the Army. “They say wireless, so we think wireless. They say instant, they say global, they say assets, profit, average, return. And just so long as certain bank accounts keep growing, we believe every word! But the thing is…” Kurtz lowered her voice. “The wire actually exists. It’s real. And it’s right under our noses. All we have to do is take it. Because what they don’t get, and we do, is that everything’s connected, that nothing comes from, or can be made from, nothing. That even what they take for granted—what they imagine is silent, or invisible, exists at some level—is a unit of power or meaning that can be used, transformed, or”—her lips curled at the corners, a playful, mocking expression that sent shivers running up and down Lota’s spine—“taken away.
“But it won’t be easy,” she continued. “Because we’re not just dealing with invisible numbers and wires. We’re dealing with invisible people, too—and people, invisible or not, are far less predictable than numbers or wires.” She stabbed at the blank space on the map with a clenched fist. “This,” she’d said, “this. What you’re looking at right now is not only the last remaining land access point for the largest and most powerful telecommunications network in the world. It’s also”—her eyes panned the room again. She wanted to make sure they were with her; they were. As usual, they listened with the hair standing up on their necks, hardly breathing, hanging on her every word. “It’s also,” Kurtz said, “a top-secret, heavily guarded black site, home to roughly sixty-five of the Empire’s most-wanted terrorist suspects, political prisoners, and other detainees.”
Lota felt a disturbed flutter of something: the rustlings of a long-forgotten memory, or else a vague premonition of something she didn’t understand. For a moment something very nearly took shape—but then, just as swiftly, it was gone. She pictured the gates of the outer station. The perched video cams, the scrub grass. Never once in all the countless times Lota had driven up to those gates had she seen a single sign of life.
“Information,” Kurtz was saying. “When it comes into the station through the wire, flows right out the other end. Information that comes into the station any other way, by helicopter, or private plane…Well, let’s just say, it doesn’t very often come out.”
Lota felt the same sensation driving through the gates of the outer station as she had sometimes jumping off the end of the wharf into the sea. There seemed to be an actual physical adjustment to a new element, or system of gravity.
What was alarming, in both cases, was how easy it was to leave the old system behind. One moment there was solid ground beneath her and the next—there was not. By the time Lota arrived at the station with Kurtz, the gates had been rolled open, the alarms and security cameras had been disabled, the dogs restrained or subdued.
It wouldn’t have been so simple if, six months before, by a stroke of luck, Hal’s brother, Nick, hadn’t been hired on at the main station as a guard. His hire, along with the hires of two other islanders, had been announced at a community meeting. An Ø Com representative had been present—sweating through his shirt. The islanders received him as they always received outsiders: with both awe and contempt.
As usual, they wanted to hate him. There was even a scattering of hisses and boos from the crowd as the representative rose to give his short address and welcome the three new members to his staff. But they couldn’t hate him—not quite. Because there was Hal’s brother and two others of their own, looking awkward and pleased in their pressed uniforms. They couldn’t help but feel a little grateful—and a little proud, too. In the same way, perhaps, that Lota had felt both grateful and proud the first time she’d seen her brother Marcus in uniform, when she was ten.
Marcus had been in the navy for less than three weeks, but even in that short time he’d been utterly transformed. At first, Lota had been unable even to touch him—let alone throw her arms around him or climb up his pant legs as she might have at some other time. She’d only stood there, staring shyly at him until—in a strained, embarrassed voice Lota had never heard before—her mother told her sharply to close her mouth.
Even then, Lota must have recognized in the polished shoes her brother wore, the sharply pressed lines of his jacket and pants, the earnest and, at the same time, strangely aloof quality of his gaze, what was—for her brother or for any other island boy—the only possible escape.
Because, despite the deep resentments the islanders still harboured toward the Empire, it was clear to everyone—even to Lota, at the age of ten—that without it, the island never would have existed. Clearer still was that the island’s continued existence depended, almost solely, on the Empire’s protection and goodwill. Although this fact elicited in most a complicated reaction that did not exclude blatant disgust, or even rage, island men who joined the Empire’s army or navy were still proudly celebrated as valiant defenders not only of the rights and freedoms of islanders but of the rights and freedoms of all.
Working for Ø Com was not at all like working for the navy, of course, but for a moment—perhaps because Hal’s brother had recently had his long hair shorn, or because of the uniforms and military-style berets—it was difficult to tell the difference.
The Ø Com man continued to speak; the crowd, by turns, to hiss and cheer. They wanted to hate him, but there was something admirable—almost noble, really—in the way he continued (chin jutted, head cocked a little to one side) to calmly d
eliver his speech, seemingly oblivious to the intermittent jeers and taunts. As with all white ghosts, though, if you looked closely enough, what appeared on the surface as confidence and formal reserve soon became indistinguishable from distress.
Three lousy jobs!
“And that’ll do them fine, for another seventy years!” Nick and Hal’s great-uncle Armand had said. He’d been sitting up front, near bursting with anger and pride, seeing as it was his own grand-nephew who’d given them all the opportunity to get so upset. “Anytime we complain they’ll say, didn’t we hire your boy Nick? Don’t you recall, sometime not long ago, we dressed him in a uniform, gave him a gun?”
Now, though, it was precisely on account of Nick Fromm’s gun that the Black Zero Army was making its way through the gates of the outer station. It was not by any accident, that is, that Nick had been on duty when Norm and Hal had driven up to the main station earlier that morning. Just as arranged, he’d promptly directed them toward the keys to the outer station and handed over his gun. By the time Lota had arrived with Kurtz and the rest of the Army, the main station was secure and Nick was standing—along with the foreign guard, the technicians, and the rest of the station personnel—with his hands bound, looking as awkward and confused as he had at the community meeting six months before.
At nearly seven feet tall, he loomed at least a head taller than everyone else and reminded Lota of the wooden totem, carved by a visiting artist a few years back, which now stood near the clock tower in the centre of town. It was “the Birdman,” the visiting artist had informed them, because hardly anyone remembered the deity anymore. He represented a time before men and women were sent to live on the earth and the birds were sent to live in the sky; a time when all humans and animals were one, and everything existed as it always had in the mind of the great spirit who did not distinguish between man and animal, heaven and hell, water and sky.
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