The American Pearl

by Peter Gilboy

  Section One is not in DC. We’re just across the Maryland border at 1325 East-West Highway in Silver Spring, what is known as the Metro Center. Nearly two million square feet of office and retail space, not to mention The Bennington with its two hundred or so apartment units. The Metro Center is large enough for us to be anonymous, and we’re small enough to hide among other government agencies there, like the Financial Management Service and the Election Assistance Commission, whatever they are.

  If you search hard, though, you’ll come across an outfit called OESS, Operational Environmental Satellite Systems. That’s us, Section One. We’re located in the OSD, Office of Systems Development, which is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Are you confused? That’s the point. And consider that we’re all under the aegis of the larger NESDS, which is the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service. And that’s just a fraction of the huge U.S. bureaucracy that no one has yet figured out. We’re tucked away on the twelfth and thirteenth floors of the southern wing, squeezed between the Acquisitions and Grants Headquarters and the National Weather Service. Hiding in plain sight.

  Just try to find us.

  I find a parking spot and take the elevator to the sixth floor. I trudge the rest of the way by stairs, two hundred eighty-one steps in all. My gut still bounces as I go up, and I have to stop to catch my breath at each landing. It’s part of my weight-loss regimen. Anything to get down to two seventy-five. I’m dressed in my usual—a coat and tie that I purchased at Big & Tall. The coat is mandatory. So is the tie. Except on casual Fridays. Section One has two hundred and four employees, civilian and military both, and three shifts on two floors of the building. We arrive at work on time and leave on time. We’re mostly on a first-name basis. We try to look like everyone else.

  I push open the door and the receptionist greets me. She knows me, but I have to show my ID in case some other big, black guy with black-rimmed glasses and a smashed nose comes in and tries to impersonate me. I go through the biometric scanner and then through the double doors, and Section One is suddenly spacious and bright. Who knows how many millions went into security here: acoustic insulation keeps sounds inside; foil insulation keeps out microwaves from the outside. We even have windows that vibrate at varying frequencies to defeat parabolic mics, and high-absorption dielectric glass to block electromagnetic transmissions.

  We’re secure.

  As I enter, everyone is focused. Not much office chatter. I look around. Dozens of specialists face the huge monitors at their stations. It’s all familiar. Friendly faces. A few of them look up and nod in my direction. I nod back. Everything is the way I left it just days ago.

  We’re home. Eddie and me.

  12

  A VILLAGE IN SOUTH VIETNAM

  DAY 6

  MORE DAYS AND NIGHTS. She tried to remember how many. They still tied her up each night, but they didn’t blindfold her now. And they still refused to feed her. They gave her water only. Patricia grew weaker. Her head pounded continuously. She had trouble standing. Her body shook from the hunger. Maybe this was their torture. When she motioned for food it was met with scolding looks or an outright laugh. They would not even speak to her. Maybe they were preparing to release her and didn’t want to waste the food. Maybe they were going to let her starve to death.

  One thing was different. Last night the man had not come for her. Maybe it was her smell. She was glad of her smell. Her smell was her protection.

  Patricia tried to stay alert, to think deliberately. Think of anything. Protect her mind. That’s all she had left. Her mind. She thought about all the Americans departing for the States—back to the world, coming home to familiar faces in familiar dens, to familiar breakfast smells. She wondered if her parents had been notified. And what they had been told. She thought back to the hours swimming for her father, hours that seemed so grueling then. He had taught her how to be tough, how to ignore the pain, how to keep going even when she couldn’t. At the end of these sessions he’d reach for her with his strong, wide hand and pull her from the water and hug her. He’d show her the stopwatch and always say the same thing: “Progress begins at the point where you think you can’t go any farther.” On the way home they’d stop for sandwiches. They’d tell silly jokes. They’d talk about school and boys and the future.

  Now the sun was up again. The same two VC women entered and untied her. They led her to the latrine area. It was brilliantly clear outside. Then they led her back to the hut. Already she could feel the heat baking through the straw-and-stick ceiling. There would be no relief, no outside breeze through the jagged window hole at the back of the hut.

  Patricia moved to a corner and huddled there, facing the door. Mosquitoes circled her ankles and shoulders. She slapped at them. She was forbidden to go near the window hole on the other side.

  Lieutenant Pavlik’s only diversion was staring out into the village as people, or the occasional animal, passed by. There were children too, nearly naked and with protruding bellies. They were innocent, she knew. They had no side. No political beliefs. They were blameless, just like children everywhere. Sometimes they came to look in the hut. The older children often held younger ones against their sides as they peered in at the village’s version of a primate in a pen. When they took her to the latrine, children followed. Sometimes they spoke in hushed tones behind her, sometimes shouting at her in some sort of mock bravado. They never went all the way to the latrine because of the smell.

  It was clear to Patricia that there was a new military offensive of some sort. She could hear air activity during the daylight hours, and she recognized the pulsating sounds of the UH-1B gunships and the drone of the spotter planes. Sometimes she heard miniguns spraying in the distance. Always in the distance. Were the Americans still flying the planes? No, the Americans were leaving. It had to be the ARVNs, the South Vietnamese government forces, who were flying the planes now.

  Her husband would be looking for her. Patricia was sure of that. He wouldn’t give up. He might already know where she is. She wondered if T.R. had escaped or been killed. She remembered the little man on the beach, the Marine infantryman, how he had run from them but later tried to protect them. Where was he now? Had he survived? Had he gone for help? Perhaps the Viet Cong were simply holding her for exchange. She wondered if this hut in this village was just a temporary location until they moved her to a larger camp with other Americans.

  Then she wondered if anyone was looking for her at all. She wondered if anyone even knew she was alive.

  13

  JANUARY 16, 2006

  SECTION ONE, 7:15 A.M.

  I SHOULD EXPLAIN ABOUT Eddie. Maybe you think that I’m making him up, or that I think he hovers around me like a faint perfume or some shifting shape at the corner of my eye. Maybe you think I’m suffering from PTSD or some other mental disorder. I am not.

  Mr. Riley taught me about Eddie. Mr. Riley was my tenth-grade physics teacher. He was also my baseball coach and the first adult other than my mother who took an interest in me. He explained in class one day that the total amount of energy in the universe can’t be increased or destroyed. Energy can only be changed, he said, from one form to another. A cue ball hits another ball and transfers its energy. We eat food, and our bodies transform the chemical energy into mechanical energy. Fire releases energy that transforms it into heat and light. Transferred, see? Not destroyed.

  So I figure this—where did Eddie go after he said, Ready? After he said, You said you’d do it, Quintyn. After he said, We have a deal, man. He was gone, you see? I mean, his energy was gone. But it wasn’t really. Like Mr. Riley said, it was just transformed. That’s all.

  Now do you understand?

  Sergeant Ramirez is working my station. He waves me over.

  “Congrats, Quintyn. Never thought you’d pull the trigger.”

  “How come getting married is ‘pulling the trigger’?” I ask him.

  “Don’t know yet. I’m si
ngle.”

  On the screen is a close-up of a man wearing a brown wool hat and a heavy coat.

  “That Boran?” I ask him.

  “The one and only,” he says, his eyes staying on the monitors.

  Deniz Boran is an up-and-coming official in a faction of the Communist Party of Turkey, which is led by Metin Çulhaoğlu. The faction is supposed to be far left but is actually far right, way far right, much like the National Socialist Workers’ Party; what we called the Nazis.

  “Where is he now?” I ask.

  Ramirez points. “Corner of Ilzik and Cihan.”

  I’ve been to that corner before. From the sky, of course. It’s in Ankara. Deniz Boran is just standing there. He has a newspaper rolled in his left hand. The headlines are visible on the outside.

  “That’s the third corner,” Ramirez tells me. “Each corner he taps the paper against his thigh, then switches it to the other hand.”

  “You’d think they’d change signals,” I say.

  “Hey, why’re you back?” he asks me. “She too much for you?”

  “That she is.”

  “You don’t deserve her, you know that, Ames.”

  “It’s my magnetic personality.”

  “Look here.” Ramirez points. On the other side of Cihan Street is a woman walking north in a heavy coat and a knit cap that covers her ears. She has a briefcase in one hand and a newspaper rolled in the other. The headlines face out. She slaps it gently against her thigh, then changes hands.

  She crosses Cihan Street and says something to Boran. He nods and says something back. Ramirez toggles to a close-up of his face, hoping the camera will catch the movements of their mouths so our lip-readers can translate.

  “Listening cones on?” I ask.

  He points. “On the corner, here,” he says. “And over there at the Hotel Abro.”

  We watch as Boran and the woman walk together, their mouths turned from the angle of the satellite. At the next corner, the woman shakes Boran’s hand and leaves. Maybe she’s passed something to him, or the other way around. Maybe it’s all innocent—the woman is just a friend of Boran’s mother’s, saying hello to him and telling him that she hopes his mother gets well because being in the hospital is so difficult. The listening cones may tell us.

  Ramirez follows her to a car. It’s a Fiat. The plate numbers are clear and there’s a blue scarf in the back window.

  He locks on Boran and then on the woman’s car and lets the satellite follow them. He leans back in his chair.

  “You don’t deserve her,” he tells me.

  “You already said that,” I say.

  I head to Alec Vogel’s office. The Colonel’s. He’s second in charge of Section One. General Martin Finders is the boss.

  He looks up as I enter. “Why don’t you try answering your damn phone, Quintyn?”

  “Good to see you too, Alec. It was only my honeymoon.”

  “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  “Tell Julia you’re sorry.”

  He puts up his hands in mock surrender. “No, thanks.”

  Alec Vogel isn’t in uniform, but one look at him and you know he’s military. Muscular and erect, cropped military hair and a long smooth jaw. He isn’t tall, more of a bulldog in stature, not to mention in temperament.

  But Alec Vogel used to be in uniform. A colonel, like I said. Then he got RIFTed. That’s government-speak for “reduced-in-force.” In human words it means he got fired. Why? The usual. Budget cuts. Then he was hired back as a civilian with the same job and more pay. That’s the government for you. And we still call him the Colonel.

  “That photo,” I continue. “There hasn’t been a sighting in years—”

  “That we’ve heard about,” he corrects. “And yeah, it could be nothing at all. Or maybe it is something. Look, Quintyn, I knew it was important to you and you’d want in. And I can’t do it without your expertise.”

  I shake my head. “It’s a long shot that it’s genuine, Alec.”

  “Then why’d you come back?”

  He’s got me there. “To stop my phone from ringing,” I tell him.

  “Right.”

  Alec opens his desk drawer and pulls out what looks like the same manila envelope that the corporal had. He holds it up. Printed in longhand on the front is one word: Magellan.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “How did you get the photos?” I ask.

  “Found them on my living room table.”

  “Nice. Whoever Magellan is, he’s telling us that he’s good.”

  “No prints on the envelope. No DNA under the flap. Nothing.”

  “Topographical analysis?” I ask.

  “Done.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  “There’s a similar river pattern in Masvingo Province.”

  “Get to it, Alec! There’s no jungle in that part of Zimbabwe.”

  “Right. And there’s only one other river pattern like that. Gia Lai Province.”

  “Jesus, Alec.”

  “Yep. There’ve been other sightings in that area, but none in years. Like I said, I knew you’d want to be included. Just in case.”

  Alec pulls out the three satellite photos and lays them in order on his desk. He points to the first one; bright colors depict the land mass, from pink to red, from green to bright blue. Same river to the south represented by the white line.

  He points to the second photo. Same shot, same colors, but now with letters that seem to glow in the early morning light.

  “Somehow the jungle got literate,” Alec tells me.

  “And this.” He points at the handwritten and underlined date: .

  “Nice,” I say.

  He picks up the third photo. Empty jungle again. “And voilà,” he says. “The letters are gone.”

  “Why did this guy, Magellan or whoever, give it to you? Gia Lai isn’t even close to our area. We’re Middle East.”

  “All I know is that it came to us,” Alec says. “Terra satellite, obviously.” He points to the corner of one of the photos. There’s a faintly embossed stamp that I hadn’t noticed before: Newcrest.

  “I checked,” Alec continues. “It’s a mining company that’s doing some surveying in Gia Lai, mostly for bauxite. My guess is someone at Newcrest thought it looked hinky and passed it on to others, and it got to Magellan, whoever he is.”

  “Does General Finders know?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Can we get to Magellan? Find out who he is and what he knows?”

  “How?”

  He’s right. “Well, the letters could be some kind of a hoax,” I say. “Or some fisherman or kid, or a drug dealer signaling to someone.”

  “And that date—January 27, 1973—is a coincidence?”

  “Okay, okay,” I say.

  “How do you want to go about it,” Alec asks.

  “Scientific method, as usual,” I say. “Somehow try to disprove it. If we can’t, then it might be something. If we can disprove it, it’s nothing.”

  “Then we need to look at that area in real time. We’ll use one of Section Three’s 74s.”

  “Those aren’t ours. We don’t have access.”

  “Well, then we’ll have to snatch one,” Alec responds.

  “You’re not serious. You trying to lose your job again, Alec?”

  He points through the office window to Corporal Towers.

  “Towers can snatch it,” he tells me.

  “The kid?”

  “He ran a dozen Keyhole and NROL sats over at the Fort Meade ground station. And he’s a genius. Should be at Princeton or MIT. Don’t know how the Army got him. Ask him anything, Quintyn. He’s a freaking encyclopedia. Should be on Jeopardy.”

  I point to the ROWBEC letters. “What does he know about those?” I ask.

  “He’s seen the photos, but I told him it might be a tourist over there, is all.”

  Alec goes to the door and motions to Towers. He enters.
/>   “Hello, sir,” he says to me.

  Towers is even taller than I remember. Tom Sawyer smile, reddish hair, and that I’ve-never-been-in-a-fight look. He’s in uniform but minus the green-and-yellow ribbon he had on before. Just a Good Conduct award now, burgundy with white stripes. The one that I never got.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’”

  “Yes, sir.” He’s trying to avoid looking at my nose.

  “You got a first name?” I ask him.

  “It’s Jodee, sir.”

  “Where’d you come from, Jodee.”

  “West Virginia, sir. Little place called Bickmore.”

  “I mean your last assignment. Where was it?”

  “Fort Meade, sir.”

  “Which office?”

  “Center for Land Use Interpretation.”

  I laugh. “That’s a good one. What’d you do?”

  “I interpreted land use, sir.”

  “Of course you did. Alec says you’re smart. Should be on Jeopardy or something.”

  “I suppose so, sir.”

  “Who’s Anna J. Cooper?”

  “She was a slave, sir, in North Carolina. And she went on to get her doctorate.”

  “What’s the scientific classification for the African elephant?”

  “Loxodanta, sir.”

  “And the capital of Mongolia?”

  “Inner Mongolia, sir? Or Outer Mongolia?”

  “Never mind. Why’d you join the Army, Jodee.”

  “I wanted a challenge, sir.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You know what that ribbon you had on was, son? The green one with yellow stripes?”

  Alec puts up a hand. “Save it, Quintyn. You can tell him later. Right now we’re going for a spin.” He turns to Towers. “You’ve run control and relay on the 74s, right, Corporal?

  “NROL-74? Yes, sir.”

  “We need you to help us borrow one.”

  “Borrow, sir?”

  “From Section Three. That a problem for you?”