Black Helicopters

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  15.: The Spider’s Stratagem

  (London, 12/12/2012)

  Ptolema taps ash, ash from her first cigarette in fifteen years, onto the polished floor of the Commissioner’s study. The tiles are cut from beds of lithographic limestone mined near Langenaltheim, Germany, the same quarry where the first specimen of Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861. If the Commissioner objects to cigarette ash on his Jurassic floor, he’s kept it to himself. Maybe he’s too absorbed in their game of chess to notice, or it may simply be that he doesn’t care. Ptolema takes a long drag, exhales, and considers her next move. The Commissioner takes chess very seriously, and it wouldn’t do to let on that she truly has no interest in whether she wins or loses. It wouldn’t do to put the man in a disagreeable mood this evening, not with her report still freshly landed on his desk.

  Ptolema sees that she can win in eleven moves and tries to decide whether or not to throw the game, whether or not it’s necessary, and if he’d know. He is a strange man, even among this bevy of strange men and women, and she has long since learned that second-guessing the Commissioner is a perilous undertaking, indeed.

  “That disagreeable woman in Dublin . . .” he begins and trails off, lifts his black knight, then returns it to the board. “I do trust that you were quite thorough before taking care of her?”

  “I’m certain of that, sir.”

  “Ptolema, my dear, no one is ever fucking certain of anything. In all the wide world, there is not a scintilla of certainty.”

  Ptolema keeps her eyes on the board.

  “After that business by the river, I tracked her down and put two bullets in the back of her head, and another in her chest. I weighted the body and sunk it in the river. Unless the Xers have mastered necromancy, you may rest assured she’s out of the picture.”

  “I never rest assured of anything.” He sighs, lifts the knight a second time, and, a second time, returns it to the board.

  “She’s dead, sir.”

  “And that other one?”

  “Her, too. Three bullets, same as the redhead. With all due respect, meting out death is one of the few things at which I excel. I’ve been doing it . . . seems like almost forever.”

  “It wasn’t an insult, Ptolema. You ought to know enough to know that. But I like to hear these things delivered directly from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Paperwork is all well and good, but it cannot replace my ability to glean the truth of a situation from the timbre, the tonality, of a human voice.”

  She has heard it said that the old man is a living, breathing polygraph machine. She’s heard it said he’s as good as a syringe of sodium pentothal or thirty seconds of waterboarding. Only an idiot would lie to the Commissioner, but, even within the ranks of their organization there are very many idiots, though their tenure inevitably proves short.

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Is it a fact that you once played Wilhelm Steinitz?” he asks her, studying the board, clearly aware of her advantage. “I have heard that, but one hears so many fairy tales.”

  “I did,” she replies. “In 1892, before he lost his title to Lasker.”

  “And you beat him?”

  “No, sir. Stalemate, after fifty-two moves. Queen versus pawn, but his pawn had advanced to its seventh rank.”

  “Still,” he said, “Steinitz. What I would have given just to have seen that game. Now, how about the Twisby woman?”

  “It’s in the report—”

  “Bugger the ruddy report. I asked you, did I not? Where do we stand in regard to that slippery bitch?”

  “No one’s seen her since the seventh of November, when she was spotted in Paris.”

  He swears and dithers over his one remaining knight.

  “You knew that already,” she says, and he looks away from the board only as long as it takes him to scowl at her. “But, at this stage, she hardly matters,” the Egyptian continues. “Not with a double agent in place on-site. We give the kill order, and it’s over. To be frank, I don’t understand why it wasn’t given a month ago. The longer we wait . . .”

  He shakes his head and leans back in his chair, as if ready to surrender the game.

  “Complications,” he sighs. “Protocol.”

  “Since when do we acknowledge even the existence of protocol among terrorists?”

  “Since, my dear, no one wants to see these parlor games escalate into all-out war. That’s since when.”

  Ptolema nods and sends a series of smoke rings towards the ceiling. The third time Ptolema met with the redhead, fifteen minutes before her execution, she’d said, “What Twisby told me, and I quote—more or less, so maybe I should say ‘paraphrase,’ instead—‘What if Einstein had needed a small push to get him moving? What if, say, Oppenheimer or Fermi had needed a bit more motivation? That’s all this is. Bête and I providing her sister a bit more motivation, so her skills are not wasted among petrified bones and dusty museum drawers. That’s all.’”

  The Commissioner says, “Also, it would be preferable, would it not, if our cryptographers made sense of that message before we dispatched the twin?”

  “Right,” Ptolema says, hardly bothering to hide her sarcasm. “The twin.”

  “Clearly this Thisby person has washed her hands of the girl, the way she’s on the move.”

  “Twisby, sir. And that may be true. Or it may be true that she’s accomplished her mission, and there’s nothing left to do but wait.”

  The Commissioner mutters, then picks up his knight, and quickly, before he can change his mind, moves it to the king’s second square. Ptolema immediately takes it with her one surviving white knight. She has him in four more moves.

  She’s thought before, and here she thinks again, how much the Commissioner looks like John Tenniel’s interpretation of the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass. The same absurd mustache. The same beak of a nose. All he needs is a sway-backed horse and spiked anklets to guard against shark bites. The White Knight sang, “I look for butterflies, that sleep among the wheat . . .”

  Only, the Commissioner always plays black. Or maybe only when he pits himself against her.

  “Blast,” he mutters and pours himself another brandy from the decanter on the table. “Blast your arse. You might at least have pretended to be taken off your guard.”

  “Apologies, sir. Your move.”

  He takes a sip of the brandy. “In your expert estimation, Ptolema, am I both imbecilic and blind? I can see the bloody board.”

  “Neither,” she replies. “A question, though. Have you considered that there’s no code to crack?”

  He looks at her as if she’s the imbecile.

  “I mean,” Ptolema continues, “hasn’t anyone considered the . . . outside chance . . . that the message is meant to be taken literally?”

  His expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t answer her. For a few seconds, the study is so quiet she could hear a mouse fart, were one to choose just then to do so.

  “More a sort of roundabout, cockeyed sort of exposition, sir. ‘Black queen white, white queen black.’ And then the second part, the Trenton transmission, ‘To see themselves, they’re gazing back.’”

  “I know the blasted rhyme, Ptolema.”

  “Of course. But it seems to me everyone’s been so busy assuming it’s the usual cryptic shit we get from the Xers, no one’s even paused to—”

  “This is in your report?” he asks. He drains his glass and watches her.

  “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

  “Odd, given it appears to have aroused in you some considerable passion.”

  “It only occurred to me just this morning. I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, and—really, it was the mirror that set me thinking there might—”

  “You have me in four,” he says. “And I despise futility.”

  “Do you want to hear this, sir? Because, if you don’t, I’ll shut the fuck up. I know I’m out of line. I don’t have to be told this isn’t
my department.”

  “I would have thought, my dear, that in all those centuries you’ve seen come and go, you’d have learned to stand your ground. I have until a quarter of,” and he points at the immense grandfather clock occupying one corner of the study.

  The Commissioner pours himself another drink. And Ptolema tells him what’s on her mind, a hunch that might be nothing more than that, but a hunch that succeeds in explaining almost, but not quite, everything they know. While she speaks, she contemplates the cross-section of a fossil ammonite preserved in the polished limestone floor. The logarithmic spiral echoes across the universe: the arms of the Milky Way; a moth to a flame; the configuration of corneal nerves; the bands of a typhoon; a fractal seahorse tail of a Misiurewicz point.

  Ptolema talks.

  The clock rings the hour, and he doesn’t interrupt her. As she goes on, his expression changes from skepticism to disbelief to the very last thing she ever expected to see him show, something she’d wager her left hand is fear.

  16.: Now[here] Man Saves/Damns the World

  (Albany, 12/20/12)

  In the labyrinth of fluorescent lights and numbered doors beneath the subbasment of the Erastus Corning Tower, the Signalman sits behind his desk and thinks the unthinkable. When you come right down to it, that might as well be the first and only line in his job description, if men like him ever were given the simple courtesy of job descriptions. The stark black hands of the round white clock hanging on his office wall, right next to a portrait of the president, say it’s twenty-five minutes until midnight. Tick-tock, tick-tock, and now it’s even less than that. He takes out the antique pocket watch that goes with him everywhere, the antique silver railroad watch that once was his great-grandfather’s, and he checks the clock on the wall against it. The two are in all but perfect accord, give or take a handful of seconds, and what the hell difference is that going to make, when all is said and done. He closes the silver watch and lays it on his desk next to the MacBook Pro sitting open in front of him. The Signalman glances up at the water stain directly above his desk, like a bruise or a carcinoma marring the interlocking tiles of the dropped ceiling, and he thinks about the great, wide world above. Tonight, he can feel all the weight of it, crushing and absolute, inarguable as his own mortality, those forty-four stories of steel and glass, concrete and Vermont Pearl marble pressing down like God’s own paperweight to hide a billion dirty secrets. To hide him and all his cohorts, Albany’s little army of invisible tin men—now you see them, now you don’t—soldiers in neat black suits and narrow black ties and black fedoras just like the one Frank Sinatra wore in Tony Rome. Somewhere out there, some think-tank asshole probably still believes this makes them inconspicuous.

  He spares another glance for the clock on the wall.

  Tick-tock, hickory, dickory, dock.

  Via the laptop’s screen, the Signalman is afforded a perfect satellite’s-eye view of the coast of Maine, of Penobscot Bay and the place where Deer Isle ought to be, but isn’t anymore. Instead, there’s only an oily looking smudge, a roiling, hazy smear to demarcate the brewing of an apocalypse.

  The Signalman cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of J&B Rare, and he pours himself two fingers, then says what the fuck and fills the glass almost to the rim. But he has time for just one sip before the door opens, and it’s Vance (no knock), and she wants to know if he’s made the call, and if he hasn’t, what’s the holdup? After all, here it is, his hour come around at last, and, by the turn of an unfriendly card, the honor and the horror and all the liability fall to him. His sentence, his encumbrance, his murdered albatross to wear.

  “Come on in,” he says to Vance, and she hesitates, then steps into his office and pulls the door shut behind her. She looks up at the clock on the wall.

  “It’s getting late, sir,” she says. “You know that, right? They’re waiting.”

  “Don’t worry,” the Signalman tells her. “The end of the world never starts without us. Read your contract. It’s right there in the fine print. You want a drink?” He points at the bottle of J&B, then takes another sip from his glass. “Come on,” he says. “Sit down. They’re more inclined to call it alcoholism when I drink alone.”

  Again, Vance hesitates. She’s a new hire, siphoned off the FBI’s Seattle field office just a couple of years back, and this is the first time she’s been around when the balloon has gone up. The poor kid’s still getting her sea legs. It’s not like she hasn’t seen some bad shit. She has, or she wouldn’t be here, standing in his office, trying to decide if sitting down for a whiskey with the Signalman is such a good idea right now, all things considered. It’s just that there’s bad shit and then there’s bad shit, and Mary Vance’s idea of bad shit is some KKK neo-Nazi skinhead motherfucker from an Idaho militia detonating a dozen barrels of ammonium nitrate, Tovex Blastrite gel, and nitromethane before she catches up with him. Mary Vance’s nightmares are populated with domestic terrorists and serial killers, not little green men and extradimensional invaders.