“No problem,” Miskulin said, still riffling through the slices of fallen stars. “I always enjoy seeing the National Meteorite Collection.”
“Ah,” Brescoll said, picking up an attractive cut stone of his own, “but you don’t particularly enjoy seeing someone like me, is that it?”
Miskulin glanced at Yamada, who suddenly became interested in the flooring.
“Look, let’s cut to the chase,” Miskulin said, putting aside the rocks from space. “Big secretive corporations, big secret government agencies—I don’t trust either of them. NSA means ‘No Such Agency.’ Wasn’t that what they used to say? Some kind of iron hammer inside a velvet computer, but it still means spies.”
“I wouldn’t exactly agree with that description,” Jim said, “though that is an interesting image.”
Miskulin looked at him narrowly, then nodded, the feathery spikes of his red-tipped dark hair following (slightly out of phase) the motion of his head.
“I gather you’re more subtle and abstract about your spying than other agencies are, but I’d bet your people have been involved in their share of atrocities. All excusable, since ‘national security’ is part of the name, right? Why should we even consider working with you?”
Jim contemplated his response. He supposed it wouldn’t matter much to Miskulin that he was the first-ever civilian director of NSA, the budget of which came entirely out of the Department of Defense.
Or that, since assuming the directorship, he’d begun steering NSA away from the militarization of intelligence that had come to dominate the intelligence community over the last two decades. Or that, in standing up to the secret-society and cryptofascist types within his own country’s intelligence community during the Kwok-Cho affair, Jim had not only put his long career in government service on the line, but also his freedom.
No, not even Jim’s having been arrested for taking his stand would redeem him in the eyes of someone like Miskulin. Somebody always has to be the truest of true believers, even holier than the holier-than-thous. Miskulin seemed to want to play that role. So be it. Replacing the wafer of stone in the tray from which he’d taken it, the director decided directness would be the best course.
“If you’re finished with your rant, I will simply tell you that I actually agree with much of what you’ve said.
I’m not an elected official, so I can tell you that yes, my agency has in the past been responsible for needless bleeding—and may well be again. We’re a sword wielded by the Commander in Chief. It’s a big world, and a very dangerous one at times. Even in an organization mainly made up of mathematicians, linguists, engineers, and codebreakers, intelligence gathering is not always bloodless.”
Miskulin looked as if he were about to respond, but Yamada cut him off.
“I’m still trying to figure out what meteorite thefts have to do with national security,” she said.
“Very little, ordinarily. Depends how you define national security. Well-placed sources, though, have suggested to me that these meteorite thefts might be linked to a number of other suspicious activities that will directly impact our security.”
“Oh?”
Brescoll nodded. “An informant on a special operations team has provided details that particularly seem to confirm that connection.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Miskulin broke in. “Why should we even consider working with you?”
As he answered, Jim Brescoll looked at him as blandly as he could manage.
“Because we’ve learned that a private military corporation covertly engaged U.S. military assets in an operation that resulted in the deaths of a tribe of meteorite cultists inside an obscure South American plateau.”
Miskulin and Yamada were both startled at the revelation. Jim was pleased to see that he now had their full attention, and continued.
“Because, by working with us, we may be able to learn not only who did the killing, but who gave the orders, and why.”
Jim picked up another of the carefully vacuum-sealed star slices.
“Look, I know you’re Paul Larkin’s nephew. I presume he has kept you on his payroll to find answers to some of the same questions that interest me.”
No startlement this time. Neither Miskulin nor Yamada gave any sign either confirming or denying that statement. Jim guessed his hunch was right, however, when another of those meaningful glances passed between them.
“Okay,” Miskulin said. “So maybe we do have a convergence of interests. Maybe.”
“What would you want us to do?” Yamada asked.
“What you have been doing, only more so. You’re scheduled to make a presentation to this year’s Exobiology Conference on the Origins of Life, aren’t you, Doctor Miskulin?”
“Yes. I’m giving a lecture at ECOL.”
“What’s the topic?”
“The role of meteorites in circumpolar shamanism.”
“Not on what happened at the tepui, though?”
“That’s still too preliminary. We need more data, more evidence.”
“Probably a good idea to keep it low profile for the time being. I gather you’re not attending, Professor Yamada?”
“It’s in Dubai. Not exactly cheap to fly or to stay there, you know.”
“Well, I may be of some assistance. In addition to what Larkin is already paying you, we will channel you funds for any particular needs you might encounter.”
“Taxpayer money?” Miskulin asked sourly.
“Don’t worry, the funds are legitimate,” Brescoll assured him. But he resisted any temptation to elaborate.
“You said ‘particular needs,’” Yamada said quickly. “I assume that would include flying to and staying in Dubai.”
“Yes.”
“In exchange for…?”
“In exchange for funding and information, I’d like you two to serve as a cat’s paw for me, in what will also be an internal investigation of sorts. I can’t offer you all the details yet, but rest assured your help will be invaluable.”
“‘Just trust us—for we are benevolent and all-knowing,’” Miskulin said skeptically. “Come on! Give me a break.”
“I don’t expect you to trust me blindly,” Jim said, smiling despite himself, “and I’ll tell you as much as I can. One thing I can reveal is that a retired military officer of high rank has been observed in the company of one Victor Fremdkunst.”
“Fremdkunst!” Miskulin said, then turned to Yamada. “See? I was right. I knew Fremdkunst had to be involved somehow!”
“How do you know this officer wasn’t just an art lover interested in Fremdkunst’s work?” Yamada asked Brescoll. “Or something equally innocent?”
“We can’t rule that possibility out completely, it’s true. But this officer has no history as either a collector of meteorites or of meteorite art. Yet, even before the events at the tepui, he had already seen to it that a meteoriticist would be employed by DARPA, in their Combat Personnel Enhancement Program. That could be circumstantial, too—just another coincidence. But the coincidences are starting to pile up.
They’re beginning to look less like accidents and more like parts of a plan.”
“Who’s the meteoriticist?” Miskulin asked. “Or is that a top secret, too?”
“Her name is Darla Pittman,” Jim said. He was surprised to see Miskulin flick his head back, then glance sidelong at Yamada. “You know her?”
“We were involved, in a meteorite collecting expedition in Antarctica. Years ago.”
It was a subtle thing, that pause after “involved.” Miskulin’s exculpatory little shrug didn’t soften at all the line forming on Yamada’s brow, either.
“I do seem to recall reading that you two were colleagues there, now that you mention it. So much the better.”
“For your cat’s paw?” Yamada asked.
“Precisely. We’ve learned that there’s been a request for an ethnobotanist to join Pittman’s team, too. I’m going to put both your names forward
, as candidates to work on the project. If someone lobbies against your candidacy, that may tell us something.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Miskulin queried.
“That may confirm some other possibilities. The same is true for Pittman. We’ll make sure your services are offered on very favorable terms. If Pittman doesn’t want either of you working for her, it may prove that she’s already working with materials taken from the tepui, or that she at least knows something about them.”
“Or it may prove nothing,” Yamada said. “We made our story about the massacre of the tepui tribe public, but it disappeared from the news way too fast. Hidden in life, and hidden in death. Those people deserved more than that.”
Jim Brescoll nodded.
“I completely agree. A special ops team with connections to our military appears to be deeply implicated in the killing of those tepui people. I want to find out why they killed them, if they did, and I want to bring the killers to justice, in any case.”
Yamada, at least, seemed to feel he was sincere. Jim pushed on.
“Maybe Pittman is innocent. Maybe she’s genuinely ignorant of the tepui, or of the massacre, or even of your reporting of it. Maybe not. It’s often difficult to distinguish feigned ignorance from the genuine article.”
“Especially when the person has had a lot of practice, hmm?” Miskulin said. “You’ve had a great deal of personal experience in that, haven’t you?”
“I won’t deny it,” Jim said, averting his glance briefly.
“Let me make sure I understand what you’re proposing,” Susan said. “You want us to spy on this Darla Pittman person, to learn more about her work for the government? And, in so doing, find out what your own people might be up to?”
“Indirectly, yes.”
“And this military officer already happens to be a professional spy. Someone who should be able to spot amateurs like us a mile away. Sounds like it’s out of our league. I don’t think we’re qualified for the sort of thing you’re suggesting.”
“I don’t want you to act as professional spies, Susan,” Brescoll said, picking up one of the meteorite slices. “What I’m asking you is whether you think you can play dumb, act smart, and keep your eyes open long enough to get some answers.”
“For whom?” Miskulin asked.
“For all of us, on all of this,” he said, taking in the meteorites with a gesture. “Everyone who might be concerned about meteorites and their impact on human history—folks like Paul Larkin, among others.”
“That sounds like some sort of conspiracy,” said Yamada.
“I prefer Doctor Miskulin’s term—a ‘convergence of interests.’ Well? What do you say?”
Yamada turned to Miskulin.
“Maybe it’ll keep Paul from harping at us about Vang, at least for a while.”
Jim startled at the name. He wondered if he’d heard right.
“Did you say Vang? Doctor Vang, of ParaLogics? What’s your connection with him?”
“We don’t have any,” she said, “but Michael’s uncle thinks we should be very careful of him.”
“Why’s that?”
“My aunt Jacinta passed some specimens from the tepui, spore prints, on to Paul, before she died. My uncle ended up providing a sample to people connected with Vang. Paul thinks he might have let too much slip—maybe enough to have revealed the tepui’s location.”
And thereby set the stage for the massacre, Jim thought. He nodded. Running background, he’d learned a little of the crazy sad story of Jacinta Larkin. He would have to learn more.
As he collected contact info from the two of them and began to say his good-byes, Jim realized he had already learned more from Miskulin and Yamada, in less time and at less cost, than he had any right to expect.
FALCON AND FALCONER
The plane flew out of the desert, sinking through darkness, toward the magic carpet of latticework and light that was the United Arab Emirates.
“In Arabic, one of the many words for ‘desert’ is also the word for ‘labyrinth,’” Vida Nasr said to Avram, turning from the window beside her. “I think it should also be the word for city.”
“For Dubai, you mean?”
“Not Dubai in particular, as much as cities in general.”
“I suppose you can get lost in both,” Avram said. “Cities and deserts, I mean.”
Glancing out the porthole window again, Vida shook her head.
“It’s more than that. Human beings were originally nomadic, right? Even before we were anatomically modern humans, we were nomadic. Hunters and gatherers. Then herders, eventually. Mobility, open spaces, small populations—I think that’s what allowed us to coexist with each other.”
Avram nodded. He found nothing particularly objectionable in that idea, but then paleoanthropology and archaeology weren’t his strongest fields of expertise.
“As soon as agriculture rooted us into a smaller compass and our populations began to swell, though,” Vida continued, “we started to build alleys and streets, courtyards and walls. We trapped ourselves in mazes—for privacy, for protection. Psychological reasons, too.”
That sounded to Avram like aspects of biology he did know something about.
“Like coral polyps building reefs,” he suggested. “Or the free-living forms of immature clams, secreting shells after they settle down.”
Vida nodded.
“If you include the arid zones of the poles, more than half the land surface of the earth is already desert,” she said. “With our help, the deserts are growing by at least fifty square miles a day—even more if you include broader global climate effects, induced by human activities.”
Avram looked at her narrowly.
“It almost sounds like you’re saying we ‘grow’ deserts.”
“Exactly so. A world culture of exponential growth against finite resources. Where people go, deserts follow, because we bring the desert with us. The city is its domesticated form, like dog is of wolf, or wheat-field of grassland. A labyrinth whose paths we think we already know, but maybe don’t. What the desert is to the Bedu in their tents, the maze of walls and streets are to city dwellers in their apartments. If the future of humanity is in cities, then the future is a domesticated desert.”
“Did you learn such ideas from the Bedouin—the Bedu?”
Vida gave a light, tinkling laugh.
“Hardly. Maybe I should say what the desert was to the Bedu. In Saudi, Oman, and the Emirates, most of them have long since given up the nomadic life for a more comfortable existence in the markaz settlements. Our last experts in wild wastelands are steadily joining the rest of us in adapting to the domesticated deserts.”
“Probably not the smartest idea for us as a species,” Avram said. “Especially if the wilds make a comeback.”
“No, maybe not so smart. That’s what’s been happening, though, all over the world.”
Glancing out the plane window as well, Avram tried to see what she was seeing. Whenever he had previously approached cities by air at night, he had thought of them as oases of light surrounded by deserts of darkness. He wasn’t so sure of that now.
“Where did you learn this stuff, then?”
“From observing high-tech counterculturists, actually,” she said, smiling. “Ever hear of Burning Man?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The Burning Man Project, officially. Started out as a performance art happening and evolved into a neotribal experiment in art, free expression, and voluntary community. A free-play zone for grown-ups in a clothing-optional, temporary autonomous theme city. Culminating with a human effigy figure many stories high, and the platform it stands on, both being burned together, via tons of fireworks and incendiaries.”
Avram arched an eyebrow in surprise.
“Sounds like a pyromaniac’s dream come true. Where could you do that sort of thing without getting in hot water with the fire authorities?”
“I think it started on a beach near San Francis
co. The summer I went, they’d long since moved the whole event onto a gypsum playa, a dry lake bed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The same place a British team first broke the land speed record at faster than the speed of sound.”
Avram nodded, familiar with such terrain.
“I’ve hunted meteorites on desert dry lakes. They’re not bad places to find stranded stones.”
“That was one of the reasons I went, too. I was interested in meteorites even then. I didn’t find any—didn’t get a chance to look, actually—but Burning Man as a whole was a crazy, wonderful spectacle.”
Avram smiled, and tried to make himself more comfortable in his seat. In their time at the Wabar digs, he’d begun to find Vida’s company altogether too pleasant. Almost dangerously so. Absently he rubbed the spot at the back of his neck, beneath which his implant lay, still presumably ticking out his location to those who knew how to listen for it.
Luis Martin and his anonymous backers most likely. The ones who had roused him from his violent despair at his daughter’s death and set him on this road—from Argentina to Wabar and now to this conference.
Sending him to Wabar had at least taken him closer to what he supposed was his intended target. He wasn’t quite sure how “The Money”—Victor Fremdkunst—fit in with what Luis Martin had offered him.
Even less clear was how this conference fit in with the plan of his larger mission. What was he supposed to learn there? Was he supposed to make some sort of connection? He seemed headed in the wrong direction.
As a professional meteoriticist he was interested enough in the conference speakers and panels, but he felt adrift, a puppet whose master had put down the strings. He’d been left to rely more and more on his own choices and chances, precisely at the time when he was becoming more unclear as to what those were. He had to remind himself more and more frequently that his mission was too important to be sidetracked or absorbed into any other plans or longings. It wasn’t easy, especially with Vida looking at him.
He snapped out of his reverie.
“Spectacle, yes. Sounds like it would be,” he said, “though I must admit I’m having trouble visualizing such an event.”
Spears of God Page 16