by Tim Lees
He winked at me. “I have people to research for me, Chris. I like to know exactly who I’m working with. Still . . . guess they were a bit slow catching that one, huh?”
“I guess they were,” I mimicked, bluffing it out. People to research for me? I thought. People to research . . . ?
“Meantime, you’re my eyes and ears. While I’m away. All right? You’re in charge, Chris.”
I’d find out how in charge I really was a few days later.
By that time, of course, Shailer would be long gone.
As I assume he’d planned.
Chapter 34
Public View
Shailer’s absence changed things at the Beach House. There was a general loosening up, a metaphorical unbuttoning. I caught a couple of guys playing on their phones when they should have been at work, which didn’t please me.
It was clear, with Shailer gone, my status at the Beach House had now changed. I was still invited in, told to feel free, look around, ask any questions that I liked. I was presented with immense amounts of data. Printouts, screenshots, programs to look over. “Take a look at this, Chris, would you please?” I was asked to check the systems, though the fact is, I knew very little about anything the systems did, a fact of which the techs were very well aware.
I took a couple of days off. A couple of days to laze around, to visit the museums and the Art Institute. To ask Angel if she wanted to come with me. But Angel, whether she wanted to or not, said she was busy, and I didn’t see her through that time.
When I got back to work, it seemed that things had moved on, and somehow, by the smallest, most regrettable of oversights, I hadn’t been informed.
“We decant at noon.”
“We decant,” I said, “at two,” and all it did was make him laugh. Not a real laugh, just a little chuckle and a smile, as if I’d simply shrug and go, “All right,” and walk away.
Instead I took my phone out.
Farnham Kuehl was a big man, six foot five, and, despite a superficial geniality, you could tell that he was used to people doing what he said. His background was in pharmaceuticals, senior management. Now he was Registry. He wore a suit under his lab coat and the gold cuff links would sometimes flash as he tapped on his keyboard. Every morning he would greet me with a pressured, athlete’s handshake, and an assurance that if I wanted anything, anything at all, that I should simply come to him and ask.
That went fine, until I actually did want something.
It had to have been planned. You don’t just decant on a whim. Kuehl must have known the date; all the senior techs must have known it, at the very least.
But somehow, I’d been kept out of the loop. Not so difficult, perhaps—I’d not been keeping business hours for quite some time—but the fact that nobody had tipped me off, not even people whom I’d thought I got on well with—that bothered me. It definitely did.
I called Shailer, not sure he’d back me up—not even sure he’d answer. I stepped outside the office as I did so, but made sure I was loud enough for Kuehl to overhear.
Then I went back and handed him the phone.
Decanting was delayed till two.
Shailer had come through for me. Does it sound ungrateful if I say I couldn’t quite believe it?
I fetched a new flask out of storage. The extra couple of hours would give me time to double-check the system and set the kind of safeguards I understood Shailer had been asking for.
Noon would have been nice. Very symbolic, I suppose. Except I hadn’t been consulted on the decision. I had not been warned. And it had given me the chance that I’d been looking for to flex my muscles, see what kind of power I really had.
And so I set to work.
It was not a situation I enjoyed.
Inevitably, there have been times my work’s attracted some attention, usually from locals curious about what’s going on; the business in Assur had been like that. Then it was their ignorance that bothered me. They couldn’t even guess what kind of trouble they were getting into.
Now, it was the other way. These people thought they knew what I was doing. They thought they understood.
At intervals, the techs would amble out and watch me. In their white coats, they looked like little gaggles of unsettled seabirds, bobbing and twittering. There was a joke they all shared. I could read it in their faces, hear it in their whispered comments. The joke was me. The joke was Field Ops. Here. In Chicago. In the most sophisticated holding center anyone had ever yet devised.
And maybe they were right.
I’d checked the whole place. After that first spike when I’d been here with Shailer, I’d run a reader over every inch of the entire building, and the sands outside, and up into the park. I’d got residual. Background. And there are precious few places on Earth you won’t get that.
I didn’t grasp a lot of the technology in the Beach House. I was always asking people what they did, how this worked, how that worked. What the overrides were. What would happen if. I was a know-nothing, a savage, a barbarian.
And maybe I was being foolish. I don’t know. The system was immaculate. Everything I saw suggested that. Every lesson learned in Indiana had been put into effect here. There were back-up generators, there were checks and cross-checks, there were belts and braces. And still I wasn’t happy.
I want a fail-safe, Shailer had said. So I gave him a fail-safe, the only way I knew how: I set up a field retrieval system prior to decanting. Just in case.
The cables laced the courtyard. I made cloverleaf patterns of them; it seemed safest, having nothing there to guide me. The wires were temperamental. I don’t know what it was. The lake, maybe, the moisture in the air. They gleamed a dull reddish color on some stretches; in others a dull, inert gray. I put a charge around them, just to check them out.
Kuehl sent a runner every ten minutes to ask me if I’d finished yet.
Eventually, I told him, “Yes.”
Chapter 35
Decanting
I had never seen this done before. Until a few years back, I hadn’t even known it could be done, but I gather it’s been one of the US Registry’s projects now for quite some time. The idea was, instead of simply draining the flask and stripping its energy, the god would be maintained, kept in a confined enclosure, from which power could, at intervals, be culled.
There’s a certain level of machismo about these things, even when half the techs are women. Maybe more so then. I don’t know.
Everyone was deadly serious.
We crammed into the Cockpit, a room of maybe twenty feet across, now so jammed with people and equipment I had to squash myself in at the back and move whenever anyone went in or out.
Screens flashed numbers, signs, schematics. X marked the spot. A man named Garcia, in the role they designated “navigator,” called the shots over a P.A. that echoed like the voice of God. It should have been Mission Control, Houston. That’s what they wanted, you could tell.
Angel Farthing squeezed up close to me, stylish in mirror shades. “Tough audience,” she said.
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Really?” She looked at me over the tops of her glasses in a way that clearly meant she found this hard to believe.
And she was right, as well.
I left the Cockpit and went out to the courtyard, to my own gear. Nobody was interested. Anyone who wasn’t busy was standing, watching what was happening in the compound. Which, right now, was precisely nothing. A man with a video camera roamed the area, storing up everything for—well. Whatever came next.
“Fields,” said the P.A.
The air began to tingle. The containment fields came up. The far wall seemed to waver for a moment as the space before it shivered, rippled, then stilled.
“Field secure. Check, please.”
A pause, and
then a second voice: “Field secure, confirm.”
Kuehl emerged from the Cockpit, all ready to watch the show. He folded his arms across his chest, set his feet apart. He looked like Citizen Kane.
Garcia’s voice said, “Commencing decant.”
The flask was there—right in the center of the field. They’d polished it up a bit more since I’d brought it back, and you’d never think that it had once been the blunt instrument in a pretty bloody assault. Now it was fastened to some large, robotic device that looked to me like a washing machine. Everything was done remotely. No one had to touch it or go near. I saw the clips snap back. I remembered Dayling in the church, staring, not at the flask, but at something above it, something I was not sufficiently tuned in to see. A magnetic clamp unscrewed the plug, turning slowly. When it came loose, it fell and clattered on the tiles. Somebody swore. Someone else said, “We’ll get it later.” The flask was open. Nothing happened. It was probably just seconds. It seemed a long time. Stillness, held breath. Then, whoosh! A sudden rush, the rapid displacement of air. My shirt billowed around me. My hands went to the deck controls. Something was happening in the center of the field. A shadow turned, prowling as if testing out the limits of its new geography, pushing the confines. The god had yet to crystalize. Sometimes they never did, remaining vague, amorphous aggregates of impulse and impressions. The kind of thing that, if it got a hook in you, could turn your psyche inside out in seconds. Again, I thought of Dayling: the look on his face when I had first discovered him there, crouching in the pew, his own humanity stretched to the breaking point.
“Ladies, gentlemen. I believe we now have a decant.”
A scatter of applause ran round the courtyard, then someone rallied it, began to cheer. Soon it must have sounded like a Saturday at Wrigley. I sat there, checking my monitors. Checking, and rechecking.
Kuehl said, “So you weren’t needed after all, Chris.”
He was standing behind me. He looked very pleased with himself. He looked large and over-stuffed and had a grin that didn’t get any more likeable by virtue of him trying to keep his mouth shut.
“Not yet,” I said. I sat there stubbornly, watching the levels. Champagne corks popped. The cameraman got everybody lined up for a final shot. Apart from me. I searched around for an empty glass and a full bottle, and then, very quietly, I made my way out to the beach.
I suppose that’s when the first abduction happened; then or shortly afterwards. But it wouldn’t cross my radar for a good while yet.
Chapter 36
Champagne on the Beach
It was quiet outside. It was empty. The soft shush of the waves soon drowned the roar of traffic out on Lake Shore Drive. It was the middle of the city, but I could have been a thousand miles away, lost in the wilderness somewhere. It would have been a big step up, make no mistake.
I refilled my glass and set the bottle on the sand. I watched the waves, their slow, hypnotic beat. I raised a toast.
“Success, my friends. Success, success, success. Da-da, da-da, da—”
“Hey.”
Angel stood behind me. She wore a short leather jacket. The breeze caught at her hair, pulling it back.
She took her shades off, came and stood beside me. With the toe of her boot, she dug into the sand, scraped a little mark there.
“Champagne?” I said.
“Gives me a headache.”
“Worth it, though. Besides—success. We’re celebrating. That right?”
“Like you’re doing.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“You know,” she said, “I think you kind of overdid things there. Made yourself look very . . . prominent.”
“I hate having an audience.”
“I didn’t say you were enjoying it.”
“I was—” I looked up at the gulls cackling overhead. “I was thorough. I did what I was asked to do. It doesn’t matter if they understand. That’s it. I did my job.”
“You wanted to see how far you could push them. Kuehl especially.”
“Well, why not? What the fuck do they know? They’re backroom boys, they’re geeks. Think they’re so fucking smart, don’t know the first fucking thing -”
“Hey. Don’t get pissed at me, Chris. I don’t run the show.”
“I wasn’t—oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m just all wound up. I don’t know what I’m doing here, I think I made a big mistake. And I’m sort of paranoid ’cause that’s exactly what the job demands, most times, and—yeah. Yeah. Sorry . . .”
“I’m hearing a record number of apologies from you today. That’s very promising.”
“Go on, go on. Laugh at me.”
So she did laugh, and I sank the rest of my drink, then took the bottle and refilled my glass.
“They’re scared of you,” she said. “That’s why they act polite. But they don’t want you there.”
“I’m doing my job!”
I felt like a child, disregarded by the adult world. I wanted to rage and stamp, throw things around. But all I had was my champagne flute, and I thought I’d better keep that. At least till it was empty.
“My job,” I said, “is to make sure everybody’s safe. Safe for them, mind, that’s the big thing—”
“No, no, no.” She wagged a finger.
“I know why I was hired.”
“Maybe. But in their view, what you’re here for is to find fault, see? Find enough fault, and you close us down. Nobody wants that.”
“And nor do I!”
“No. But to these guys—it’s their whole career. This is their big thing, then you just come along, and . . . well. I don’t think most of them know what you’re here for.”
“I explained it. I explained to all of them. Over and over.”
“Chris,” she said. “Did it never strike you that your job doesn’t add up? Really?”
I didn’t answer.
“Think about it now. From their end, right? You’re not tech. You said yourself, you don’t know half of what they’re doing here. Still—they fly you in, they set you up here—and I’m pretty sure it’s not ’cause of the way you talk, either.”
“I’m Field Ops.”
“We in a field?”
“You know what I mean.”
“To these guys, all you are is Shailer’s little spy. And all you’re doing here is trying to catch them doing something wrong.”
“I can’t stand Shailer. Besides . . .”
But the answer had been staring at me all along. I knew it suddenly. I looked back at the Beach House. It looked very still, very calm.
I said, “I’m here for when containment fails.”
“It won’t fail. Foolproof. System’s a gem. You said so yourself.”
“It’ll fail. He knows it. Shailer. That’s why he’s out of town. Bad timing, what a pity, dear oh dear. It’ll fail, and I’ll be here to sweep his fucking mess up, all over again.”
“Well,” she said, “they’re partying hard right now. So if you plan on telling them—yeah. Good luck with that.”
She started back, but I called after her.
“Angel?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Can we go somewhere? You and me?”
I’d spoken before I meant to, spoken without thinking.
“I just don’t want to go back in there. And, you know . . . don’t want to be alone.”
Slowly, she put her shades back on.
“If I apologize again? Will that help?” I was trying to make a joke of it, give us both a way out. But she hesitated, checked her watch, and glanced at the Beach House with the trees and city blocks behind it, backlit by a sinking sun.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “I’ve got a friend who calls this kind of party ‘mandatory fun.’ I get a lot of it, given the job.” She looked along th
e beach, pulled one hand through her hair. “Besides,” she said, “I need to talk to you.” She smiled then. “So let’s go eat, huh?”
Chapter 37
The Blues in Africa
“There’s an Ellington tune,” she told me. “A piano piece, up-tempo, fun stuff. But if you listen to the phrasing, the melody, it’s African—traditional African. Now, OK. Maybe there’s a route there, maybe it’s been handed down through work songs, generation to generation. Maybe. But the point is this: it all links up. All of it. It all links up.”
It was a loud bar. Sports on the TVs, people talking, yelling all around.
We leaned close. We had to.
“There’s guys, right, guys in North Africa, they play the blues. Not the Chicago blues, and not the Delta blues. The African blues. That’s what I wanna hear.”
The waitress came by, brought our burgers and our drinks. “Ain’t seen you in an age,” she said, and Angel smiled. “Been around,” she said, but when the waitress left, she looked at me, wide-eyed. “What’s going on? I haven’t been in this place since forever, you know? Never even seen her before—”
There was an atmosphere. It pulled you in, it caught you up. Before I knew it, I’d practically forgotten what a bad mood I’d been in. It wasn’t just the booze, either. It wasn’t even—though I hated to admit this—being with Angel once again.
“So—get this.” She was talking quickly, urgently. “Next year, if all goes well, I’ll get my doctorate. Doctor Angel Abney Farthing, for what that’s worth. I’ve been doing this—it feels like centuries, you know? Two jobs, studying. Cen-tu-ries. And now it’s all about to end.”
“That’s pretty amazing. You should never forget that, the achievement—”
She held a hand up, silenced me.
“The question I’m looking at right now is: What next?”
“I’m the same,” I said. “I’m wondering that, and—”