Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Nothing here. He looked out the window and caught a glimpse of Patience dashing across the parking lot in his hooded poncho, his polished wing tips leaving brief footmarks on the wet asphalt before being obliterated by the downpour. He thought about looking through the man’s desk, but knew there’d be no point to it. If there were anything to find, Patience wouldn’t have let him in here, let alone let him stay here by himself.

  He was just here to be impressed by Patience’s computer system and Patience’s personality.

  Assholes, he thought, always advertise.

  Loren circled the room, the soft Turkish rug cushioning his steps. UNIT 77-112, he read as he looked at the plaque. For someone who had participated in an undeclared, top-secret Special Forces action as part of a unit that didn’t even have a name, William Patience sure did everything he could to let everyone know about it. It enhanced the mystique, no doubt. ABRACADABRA.

  The certificates on the wall were from an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and a number of graduation certificates from survival courses. One of them graduated him from the “Advanced Course” on “Interrogation Resistance and Escape Techniques.”

  Great. The guy had himself tortured on his vacations just to see what he was made of.

  Loren looked at the other bookshelf. Managing Stress. Breath Control for Yoga Mastery. Fifteen Deadliest Strikes. Sharpening Your Mind for Effective Action. Relax! Survival in a Desert Environment. Manual of Sudden Death (three volumes). Secrets of Concentration. How to Beat Ulcers.

  Ulcers, Loren thought, no shit. The guy was so tightly wrapped it was a miracle he hadn’t detonated by now.

  He returned to the computer and began putting data into the memory stick, his eyes scanning the screen and his fingers working the mouse while his thoughts drifted elsewhere.

  Detention. Ham and cheese sandwiches. Coffee.

  Right. Suppose that at some point Friday or Saturday Patience or his men put someone in the detention room. Suppose they fed him dinner, and when a guard arrived to take away the tray, the prisoner clocked him, scraping a couple knuckles in the process. Suppose the prisoner ran out into the parking lot, yanked Jernigan out of his car, and drove off. Suppose he got shot making his escape.

  No, Loren thought, because it doesn’t make any sense. ATL had a perfect right to shoot at someone in those circumstances. If that’s what happened, why hide it?

  The drumming on the roof diminished, then ceased. There were footsteps in the outer office, then the sound of the buzz lock. Patience came in carrying a pair of ledger-sized books. He’d left the wet poncho outside.

  “Here you go. I’ve marked Friday for you.”

  Loren looked up. “Thanks.”

  Patience looked over Loren’s shoulder. “Getting anywhere?”

  “Vastly increasing my paperwork.”

  “My sympathies. But you did volunteer.” Patience walked to the center of the office, then bent and took off his shoes. He took off his coat and shoulder holster, then put them both on the coatrack. “Unless you have some questions,” Patience said, “I’m going to do some stretching.”

  “Fine.”

  Patience lowered himself to the carpet. The desk blocked Loren’s view of most of what he was doing, but whatever it was seemed to require a lot of grunting, as if someone was hitting Patience repeatedly in the breadbasket. Breath control, Loren thought, for torture subjects. Maybe Patience could write a book about it.

  He finished loading his disk and removed it from the drive, then turned to the two logbooks Patience had brought, one from the vehicle entry, the other from the maglev station. He opened the first to the spot Patience had indicated with a white slip of paper, saw scribbles of signatures in blue or black ballpoint, the confusion of names, addresses, and ID numbers. He paged through, looking carefully, guiltily, at the binding to make certain nothing had been torn away. Apparently nothing had. He looked at the other logbook and found much the same. He hefted them both and peered over the desk at Patience.

  “Is there a place where I can Xerox these?” he asked.

  Patience was lying on his back with his knees bent and feet under his butt, a position Loren recognized from his high school football days as one that could tear out knee tendons if you weren’t limber enough. His long hair was spread out on the carpet like that of a swooning Victorian maiden. There was a light dotting of sweat on his forehead.

  “Just ask Annette,” he said.

  Loren rose and went into the secretary’s office. Patience’s poncho dripped rainwater in one corner. The secretary— Annette, he presumed— pointed out the copy machine, a beige box sitting beneath a swirling color photograph of masked Chinese dancers. Loren declined her offer of assistance and made copies, then returned to Patience’s office.

  Patience was on his feet, tying his hair back. He was breathing hard, dabbing sweat with a handkerchief.

  “I guess I’ve got what I came for,” Loren said.

  Patience looked out the window. Sunlight gleamed off puddles on the asphalt. “Would you like a look at the proton accelerator?”

  “Very much.”

  “We’ll take my jeep. You wanted me to show you how the SMGs are stored, anyway, right?”

  Loren had forgotten. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

  They left by a back door that opened by a push bar, like a door in a theater. It led directly into the parking lot. Loren considered how easy it would be for a fugitive to slip through the door without anyone necessarily seeing him.

  The sun blazed on the parking lot, reflected on spilled oil and puddles. A dark shroud of water obscured the mesa east of them, but here the thunderstorm was over. It wasn’t enough, Loren thought, to alleviate the drought conditions. The lightning would just start more forest fires.

  Patience led him to a gate on the fenced-off chain link parking lot, then opened the gate with his holocard. The fleet of Blazers, together with the weaponry in them, was fenced off from anyone not possessing a card. Like, Loren thought, escaping prisoners.

  Patience led Loren to one of the jeeps, opened the door with a key, and got in. Loren got in the passenger seat.

  “We keep the UZIs in here,” Patience said. His knuckles rapped a featureless black aluminum box set between the front seats, just abaft the emergency brake. He pulled on the front box lid and the box folded back on hinges. Beneath lay two submachine guns with their pistol grips up, a position that allowed them to be seized easily in an emergency. Each had a magazine inserted in the pistol butt, and additional magazines were clipped underneath. Both weapons were locked down with a heavy metal bar that crossed just forward of the trigger guard. A ten-key pad, white plastic keys beneath a red LED, sat atop the bar.

  “That bar is heavy alloy,” Patience said. “Hacksaw-proof. You’d need to work at it with a torch for ten minutes. In order to open the lock you have to know the right three-digit combination.” He reached for the pad, his index finger pointing.

  “Let me,” said Loren.

  The hand hesitated. “Okay,” Patience said.

  Loren reached down and punched 571. The red LED went off and a green one winked on. Loren yanked up on the pad, pulling the bar away, then took one of the UZIs by its grip and pointed it at Patience.

  “Bang,” he said, “you’re dead.”

  Patience stared at him, eyes wide. Loren smiled.

  Patience’s hatchetlike face froze in an expression of vast, cold anger. “Who told you?” he said. His voice had a tremor in it, a stammer on the t— he’d been scared, Loren thought, when the muzzle came in line. And Loren didn’t blame him.

  Loren returned the weapon to its cradle. “No one,” he said.

  “I’ll fire the son of a bitch.”

  “Look at the keypad,” Loren said.

  Patience’s eyes dropped reluctantly to the locking device. Loren slammed the bar down on the SMGs. The red LED winked on, the green off.

  “Three of the keys are dirty,” Loren said. “It had to be that combi
nation or one of a couple others.”

  Loren heard the breath going out of Patience, a soft hiss. Then a humorless laugh.

  “You’ve taught us a lesson, Loren. From now on everyone gets a bottle of Windex to keep the keys clean. Thank you.”

  “You can thank me more by keeping these guns out of my town.”

  Patience gave him a quick glance, then an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

  “You’re gonna have some of these stolen sooner or later. I don’t care how good your security system is. The thief’ll probably be some snot-nose kid who’ll use them to shoot up the high school or some other kid’s car, but I don’t even want a minor-league bad-ass in my town with that kind of firepower.”

  “I can’t remove the guns,” Patience said. “It’s not consonant with my mission.”

  Loren squared himself in the seat and looked out a windshield spattered with connect-the-dots raindrops. Futile anger buzzed in his brain like a wasp battering its brains out against a car window. “We’ll see,” he said.

  Patience looked at him for a moment, then replaced the metal box over the machine pistols. He started the Blazer, backed out of his parking place, hit the button that would open the fence. The route took him back to the main drive, past Discovered Symmetries again, then down the boulevard past an administrative building and a pair of the barrel-roofed structures, including the one labeled FIDO.

  “Black labs,” Patience said. “Where they do the classified work.”

  One of the bunkerlike structures was labeled PRINCE. Another was SHEP.

  “Black labs,” Loren said. “I get it.”

  Patience gave him a puzzled look. “Get what?”

  “Black labs.”

  “Yes. They’re black laboratories. What about it?”

  “Black labs? As in Labrador dogs? SHEP? FIDO? Physicist humor. Get it?”

  Comprehension dawned in Patience’s eyes. He gave a polite and completely humorless laugh. “I see it now. A pun. I see.”

  Loren watched beaded raindrops bleeding across the windshield. What kind of person was this? he wondered. He must pass by those buildings every damn day.

  He probably just assumed it wasn’t his job to figure it out.

  “I don’t know exactly what they do in there.” Patience sounded aggrieved.

  “You don’t need to know, do you?”

  “I guess not. But if I hear someone with black-lab access talking shop to someone in a bar, I don’t have any idea whether he’s blabbing classified information or not.”

  “Depends on who he’s blabbing it to, I suppose,” Loren said. “If it’s someone in a baggy suit with a Russian accent, I suppose you’ve got a problem.”

  That humorless laugh came again. “You know it was Kim Philby who taught Russian spies how to dress? And most of the scientist types are so happy to talk science, they’ll talk it with anyone. And though they don’t necessarily disregard security classifications, they’ll just talk around the classified stuff and leave it to their audience to infer what they’re leaving out.”

  Not Jernigan, Loren thought. The guy just sweated and stuck to his story. And it looked like Dielh wasn’t going to talk at all.

  The Blazer reached the end of the boulevard, then turned left. At the end of a quarter mile of blacktop was a low flat-roofed building, poured concrete painted brown, that looked like an Indian pueblo built by monomaniac German perfectionists. Beyond the building the high desert with its surreal towers of interweaving ocotillo spines and waving tufts of yucca.

  “Why’s this one by itself?” Loren asked.

  “The black labs and administrative buildings are clumped together for security reasons. This one’s closer to the boonies because that’s where the accelerators are. And the magnetic fusion device and the high-explosive site are way the hell out by themselves.”

  “High-explosive site?”

  Patience parked in front of a wooden blue-on-turquoise sign that said LINAC. “Yes.” Yanking back the emergency brake. “Down at the MCG— magneto-cumulative generator. You create a magnetic field in a specially shaped chamber, then compress it with an explosion. Channel the force onto a target. It’s something the Russians got a head start on.” His fingers did a little dance in the air, tracing an explosion. “Boom. Target vaporized.”

  “Great.” Without enthusiasm.

  Loren followed Patience toward a pair of twelve-foot-tall steel doors set into an alcove in the front of the building. Patience didn’t need his card to open the lock; he just pulled back on the unlocked beige steel door and stepped inside. Loren was surprised.

  “No security out here?” he asked.

  “Nothing classified goes on in this building. So all they do is lock it at night if there’s no one around.”

  “Huh.”

  “But someone’s almost always here. These guys keep all kinds of hours— you’ll see that when you get a chance to study the logs. People check in at two in the morning and pull eighteen-hour shifts.“

  The interior walls were nonprettified concrete with the impressions of the wooden forms still on them, all painted a sickly government green. Corkboards hung on them, and the boards were full of notices, put on four or five deep. Some announced conferences on one obscure subject or another. Many were headed A CALL FOR PAPERS. Some appeared to be the papers themselves. Loren squinted at one of them. Insights into the Nature of Classical and Quantum Gravity via Null-Strut Calculus. Loren gave up on that one and looked at the next. Multi-Megampere Plasma Flow Switch-Driven Liner Implosions.

  No help.

  The first few rooms they passed were empty offices with whiteboards, corkboards, and steel desks with computer terminals. In the intervals between these and pastel-green steel bookshelves were more travel posters. Loren wondered if ATL bought the posters wholesale. He was beginning to feel oppressed by the constant overhead fluorescent light in all these installations.

  “In here,” Patience said. He opened another of the doors, one with CONTROL ROOM stenciled on it. Below the stencil was a bright fluorescent green-on-orange bumper sticker with the by-now-familiar message about Heisenberg and where he may or may not have slept.

  “Good Lord,” Loren said. He had stepped into what looked like a Pentagon situation room, at least half the length of a football field, all subdued lighting, dark consoles, unwinking high-resolution monitors. All that was needed was a giant map of Russia overhead.

  Loren was standing on the second level, on a kind of balcony running around the entire room. Ventilators made a continual, hushed white-noise sound. Thirty-inch video monitors, lining the walls, gazed at him with bright, unblinking eyes. Brushed-aluminum railings set into polycarbon supports kept any hypnotized bystanders from toppling into the lower level. The area below was lined on all sides by matte-black control banks and more monitors, most of which showed only a test pattern, a computer-generated version of the ATL logo that went through constant, slow changes in color to prevent phosphor burn. Half the monitors were holotanks on which the logo rotated slowly, in three dimensions. There was another bank of monitors in the center of the room, each side sloping toward the center, permitting two sets of technicians to face one another during operation.

  It’s the goddamn starship Enterprise, Loren thought.

  Intent on one central-bank monitor were two young men, both muttering intently as they leaned forward from contoured leatherette chairs to stare deeply into a holographic image. Plush carpet absorbed Loren’s footsteps as he followed Patience down a cantilevered stairway and out onto the floor.

  “You’re losing it!” one of the men said. He was Asian, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. “You’re gonna crash and burn.”

  “Motherfucker!” A flash lit the other man’s face from below. He was a burly man, with corded muscles and a thick neck, obviously a weight lifter.

  “Commit!” the first man urged. “Commit!”

  “I don’t have my ears on!” Frantically tapping keys.

  “You don�
��t have a choice!”

  “Shit! Shitshitshit!” Another flash highlighted his profile. Both men slowly relaxed, reluctantly leaning back in their padded chairs. Both appeared to have suffered an inconsolable loss.

  “Sixteen thousand,” the first said. “That’s not bad.”

  “I’ve done better.”

  “If I can interrupt,” said Patience. Both men glanced up.

  “Hi.” The first man, the weight lifter, rose from his seat. He wore Levi’s, brown work boots, and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show off the curve of his biceps. He had a turned-down brown mustache and wore dark-rimmed spectacles— he looked like a well-off rancher on his way to town.

  “I was looking for someone to give Chief Hawn a tour,” Patience said.

  The man looked at his friend and grinned with a silver front tooth. “I guess we can spare the time.” He stepped forward and offered a hand to Loren. “I’m Kelly Steffens.”

  “Loren Hawn.”

  “Yoshi Kurita.”

  Loren shook hands with them both. Kurita had a thin, enthusiastic face and spectacles held together with tape over the bridge of the nose. His T-shirt had a holo picture of the Galileo explorer firing an instrument package into one of Jupiter’s moons. It looked as if there were a square, black hole in his chest, with planets and the probe floating eerily inside.

  “Nice shirt,” Loren said.

  “New process.” Grinning. “You’ll see it on every street corner in six weeks.”

  “I bet.”

  “I’ve got some phone calls to make,” Patience said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t worry, I’m just going upstairs.”

  I won’t worry, Loren thought, but didn’t say it.

  Patience went back up the stairs two at a time. Loren felt as if he were swimming deeper into quicksand. He knew now he wouldn’t find out anything important. The tour was like the computer files— if there was anything important to discover, Patience wouldn’t have left him alone with it.