Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  “Just Harrison, as far as I could tell.”

  “Not the science guy who was actually lying to me?”

  “He was lying under duress. That’s why he was such a nervous wreck.”

  Haydon grunted, reviewing his memories.

  “Look”—I pitched my voice low—“I respect Harrison. I’ve been happy to serve under him. Until recently.”

  “Recently.”

  “I understand the mentality. You look at Moss and you see the next frontier, the future, whatever. It’s hard to say, ‘It’s cash-in time.’ Maybe you even start hoping—”

  “He’ll wake up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you don’t think that.”

  “It’s not that I don’t think that. It’s that I don’t care.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.” Another delicate sip.

  “We’re not the Moss Base anymore, we’re the Harp Base. Two weeks ago we were a novelty. Now we’re strategic. Our work-product will see field deployment. We’re not tucked away anymore, we’re on the board. That’s a house worth running.”

  “Worth running … by you.”

  “Yes, sir. Worth running right.”

  “As long as we’re talking hypotheticals, then … How would it work? How would you see this little transition going down?”

  This I’d certainly thought about. “You generate an order on Sierra executive stationery, over your signature, granting me the position of interim director at Quill Marine, effective immediately. This letter would further empower me to implement the transfer of Moss’s body to the location of your choice.”

  “Maybe I’ll bring him here, sit his rotting ass right up in the Smithsonian.”

  I ignored that and went on. “You’d e-fax the letter to me, then send the original—witnessed by an attorney and couriered under official seal—directly to Harrison’s desk.”

  He laughed, shaking his head and leaning back on his bar stool. “Jesus Christ. You’re a hungry little beaver, aren’t you?”

  Hercules himself saluted from the Underworld at the effort it took for me to stuff my suddenly ballooning rage at that little comment. Haydon was trying to ruffle me. I had expected this.

  Enemy territory. Keep charging.

  “I’ll do an extraordinary job, sir. I’ll run Quill like a machine. It’ll be one less thing you have to worry about.”

  “See, that’s funny. I kinda think the exact opposite.”

  “Sir?”

  He picked up his drink again, but he didn’t sip. He just eyed me over the glass.

  “How long you been a vegetarian, Prentiss?”

  I stared back at him. I wasn’t going to let him rile me up or knock me off my foundations. This was me, well rested and

  And being absolutely insane.

  “I actually know a fair amount about you,” he continued. “It’s all trivia until the rubber meets the road, but … I wouldn’t have suspected you were someone so, to use your word, undermining.”

  And he was right. Harrison didn’t deserve this. But there was also already no way this could all go down without dragging him along. So.

  Charge.

  “I would have preferred not to be here, sir.”

  “And yet.” He gestured: here we are. “I hadn’t pegged you as a climber. I look at you and I think: she wants to nest. She’s solid. I’m not usually wrong about these things. And being wrong doesn’t sit well with me. ’Cause the thing about climbers is, they always tell themselves, ‘Oh, yes, this is my branch, I’m happy here.’ But then … time goes by. They start looking up.”

  “Respectfully, sir, who could I could sell you out to? I can’t see that working with your father.” The upper echelons of Sierra management were, like the most dangerous of conditions, congenital.

  “My father said maybe three things to me before I was twenty. And one of them was: always watch out for people who give a lot of thought to their position.” He let that hang for a moment. Then, at last, he took a sip. He sighed as he put the glass back down. “When are you back at Quill?”

  “Wednesday, day after tomorrow.”

  “Meaning you’d need the letter and the e-fax to go out tomorrow?”

  “Ideally at end-of-day. I want him to know what it says but not have time to react.”

  “Jesus,” he chuckled. “You really are going to be a problem.” But there was something in his voice. I think it might have been respect.

  A waitress was suddenly by me, laying down a plate of steaming hot mozzarella sticks and marinara sauce on the bar. She did it consciously, as if she’d been yelled at or worse for putting food down incorrectly before. Once she placed the plate she disappeared.

  Haydon looked at the food, then at me. He was grinning. It looked positively malevolent in the dim light.

  “Look at that, Prentiss. You done surprised me again. That’s the last time you’re allowed to do that in this lifetime. Next time I’ll have to get stern. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’m planning on fucking somebody tonight and Christ knows it’s not gonna be you.”

  I stood up. “Goodnight, sir.”

  As I passed College Girl on the way out, her eyes met mine. They were shining and intelligent and completely without illusion. We’re just two flies feasting on the same carcass, those eyes said.

  * * *

  THE NEXT morning, I texted Lisa, I’m here, and my phone chirruped with a response from her number: u-n-l. I took it to mean her apartment door was unlocked. I was right. The lights were all off, and while I could see for the sunlight coming through and around the closed drapes, the gloom was palpable. It was the opposite of the glow inside Moss’s ship: rather than a mysteriously omnipresent light source, a strange, diffuse darkness saturated everything.

  I headed straight for her bedroom before checking anywhere else. Sure enough, she was there, lying down, facing away from me, on top of the covers. I remembered this. This is how it ended with us the last time.

  Lisa’s apartment was haunted—this room most of all.

  “I’m gonna get up,” she sighed. “I just need a minute.” She sounded … well, “exhausted” is too quaint a word. She sounded like she’d been bled.

  “Or sleep a little,” I said softly. I got in bed with her, laying my back against hers, letting her feel at least part of me there. “I’ll sleep too. I’m wiped.”

  “No, you won’t.” Her voice, hollow and bruised. “When I get up I’m going to give you a piece of paper with coordinates, a date, and a time. Usual procedure: memorize and shred.”

  “Sure.”

  “They said, ‘Bring both items or no deal.’ The rendezvous is a stretch of desert. Near the Tex-Mex border but on our side. The Coyotes don’t use it, neither do the ICE hunters. The driver will be Mexican. The van will be a rusty, old fruit van that goes back and forth so often the border personnel treat it like it’s a running joke. Plus, you’re crossing in the easy direction, so.” She swallowed. Her throat clicked. “He’ll wait for half an hour.”

  “That’s tight,” I said, as if I could somehow bargain, as if this all weren’t already set in stone, take or leave it. She went on.

  “He’ll drive you, the items, and your … partner to a mobile lab Zhang’s colleagues control outside Juarez. One team to examine and confirm the one item, another team—and Zhang didn’t explain what he meant by this—with a disposable subject to test the other item.”

  “Okay.” Another X. My stomach cramped momentarily at the thought.

  “I suppose you won’t tell me what any of this means?”

  “Sure—what do you want to know?” I chuckled ruefully.

  She gave the tiniest of laughs—but genuine. “Okay. Bluff called.”

  At one point in time I could always make her laugh. And there had been situations where she had really needed to. Unfortunately, laughing together in the face of near disaster after near disaster … led to complications. Laughing is a lot like cumming: in the right light it can look like something
else.

  But there was a very real chance that right now she was just sad about her recent breakup, nothing more. I clung to that.

  “If both tests conclude satisfactorily,” she went on, “payment and papers will be presented for your review. If those are satisfactory, the next stop will be an airfield, then Managua, then Helsinki, then Beijing.”

  “Understood. All of it.”

  “That’s all I have to say,” she sighed. “I guess I should get up now.”

  She didn’t move. A thousand variations of what I could say, what I felt like I should say, fluttered through my mind like a startled flock of birds, each one effectively blotting out the other. Are you okay can I help is there something you need to say something you don’t want to say, and so on, taking flight in a deafening disarray. So I stayed silent. I didn’t have to wait too long before she let me in, anyway.

  “You’re changing your life, Dak,” she said, her voice pitched high. She was trying to sound positive, excited even, and it took the effort of someone bending rebar. “I’ve never changed my life.”

  “That’s fucking crazy talk; you’re drama city.” I hoped that made her laugh. It didn’t.

  “My drama never came from me. I was in it; I didn’t write it. I just did whatever was on the pages they handed me.”

  “You know I know what that’s like. That’s been my whole life too. Following orders.”

  “Except not anymore. Even if you die halfway … and let’s be honest, you are going to die halfway … you’re changing your life. You’re taking charge. A better friend would be happy for you.”

  Ha—I took the Charge, all right.

  It’s the recent breakup talking, that’s all. She’s just in a shitty place right now.

  “Come out some time when we’re settled. Meet him,” I offered.

  A flash of a night many years ago. In this very room. Cheeks sore from laughing. Her mistaking the signals. My rebuff, harder than it needed to be. We’d spent too much time together, too many extreme situations; we were drunk on each other’s company and I could be a nasty drunk. A night of painful confrontation—not too dissimilar from yours and mine, actually, when I squatted naked over my backpack, what I’d already begun to think of as the Night of the Contracts. Only in this case, the night ended with an unexpected break-in, an attempted assassination, and my overzealous commitment to my job.

  No, that’s not where the night ended. It ended with the horrified look on her face after I reduced a man’s skull to compote on her bathroom floor.

  “I don’t think I want to,” she said at last. “As long as I don’t meet him I can keep thinking he’s good enough.”

  “He’s good enough,” I replied, and I was surprised by the broken desperation in my own voice.

  We stayed in silence for a while longer, and when she finally spoke, her voice was as flat and dull as an old knife … but goddammit there was still steel there.

  “I really am going to get up.”

  “I know.”

  “I just need one more minute.”

  And just like that I realized something. The rest of my plan had fallen in place with horrible, thudding clarity. I saw it all, every step. In fact, I had known what to do all along. It was simple. It was cruel. And it would work.

  * * *

  I COULD have driven straight from D.C. to the Myrtle Beach airport but I figured, what the hell, there was time. I made a detour to the beach. The sun was setting and the world seemed queerly empty. Everyone had gone in for dinner or to get plastered, I imagined. Or maybe they’d all been erased by some great Etch A Sketch shake-up and I was left all alone on this strange and breathable planet. Just me and the birds. Had you survived? I would walk across the country to find out if I had to.

  I stood looking out at the water for maybe ten minutes—my actual vacation—and tried to empty my mind.

  * * *

  I BOUGHT a ticket for the last flight out of Myrtle Beach. I grabbed some snacks, sipped some seltzers at an airport bar, and then purchased a change of clothes for both of us at a souvenir shop called Life’s a Beach.

  I touched down in California well after dark, lingered a little longer in the food court picking at some soggy, sodium-enriched food until everything began to close, then headed to the long-term airport parking lot to steal the most nondescript van I could find. It was old and a little shabby—it might have once been white but now I’d have said it could only be called the color of neglect—and the empty space behind the front seats, caged off by a sheet of mesh, looked exactly big enough.

  First I drove to your hotel. I pulled over and looked up at your window. The tiny room was as monumental to me as any ocean and so I sat and paid homage like some silent and awed tourist. I needed to be there so bad. I needed to be wrapped around you, swimming in you. But if I did that I’d tell you everything. And you had a lie detector to beat tomorrow morning.

  One last time.

  I forced myself to drive away.

  I parked the van under a bridge about a mile from Quill Marine. Hiding it only made it more conspicuous, but I only needed it to stay there another twelve hours. I stashed our change of clothes under the passenger seat and then all that remained for me now was the hour-long walk home. I was grateful for it. It might make me tired enough to sleep a few hours. With the day I had coming tomorrow I needed all the rest I could get.

  You’re still running the Charge, Dak. This is why it’s so dangerous. Everyone thinks the initial assault is the risk, but you’ve done that and now you’re looking at the actual hard part. Everywhere you look is enemy territory now.

  Not for long. This time tomorrow either I would be driving that van to Mexico or I’d be dead.

  One or the other.

  I started walking.

  PART FIVE

  LIVING FISH AND DEAD FISH

  20

  I HAD roughly ninety seconds of feeling like maybe things would go okay, and then:

  “Well, it’s not off to a great start!”

  Parker had just handed me back my ID at the front gate. He’d made some anodyne statement about how good it was to have me back, and I’d responded with an equally trite “Let’s see how it goes.” That’s when he hit me with that first of what would soon be a marauding army of red flags.

  “What? What are you talking about?” I did my best to keep any actual alarm out of my voice. I aimed for bemused—an “Uh-oh, this monkey house again” sorta vibe.

  “Harrison,” Parker responded, and the winch holding my stomach went slack for a second. “Showed up a little after oh-six-hundred looking cornholed. Suddenly he’s Mr. Mornings.”

  “Harrison’s … here?” He would have received his termination early yesterday evening (though I couldn’t predict who else would know that). I supposed it wasn’t abnormal that he’d need a little more time to clear out—it wasn’t as if he were being spirited off to prison or anything—but still, I’d wanted him removed as a variable.

  “Sort of,” Parker snorted. “He doesn’t look all here, if you know what I mean.”

  “Huh.” Red flag, flapping in the cool summer breeze. “I guess I’ll find out.”

  “Want me to let Patty know you’re here?”

  “Nah, I’ll see her downstairs. Thanks, though.” The last fucking thing I wanted was Patty anywhere near me while I went through the lie detector. While I did what I had to do to Lauren.

  Parker opened the gate and I drove through. Your car was where it should be, two lanes down from mine. I let that steady me. If you’d flunked the lie detector, they would have been stripping your car down already, making it disappear. But it was there. You were safely inside.

  Time for me to attempt the same. I opened the door to Quill Marine and fed myself to the Great Bug.

  * * *

  “MY—MY GOD … My God, what is this? What is this I see?” Rosh’s voice echoed as I walked toward his station. “Yet another total stranger approaching my humble booth?”

  “Yo
u know what, Rosh, I think I was gone just long enough to miss these jokes.”

  “DAMN YOU, HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?” he cried, his hands curling into fists that shook impotently at the heavens. “Place your chin here and slowly exhale without blinking.”

  I did as he asked, smirking in spite of everything.

  I hoped he got out of today okay. I hoped he’d go and find himself a Renaissance Faire or something to live out the rest of his days in hammy, prescribed bliss. I hoped—

  “It’s … it’s like a miracle,” he stage-whispered. “I was blind and now: vision! It’s Security Chief Dakota Prentiss!” I stood up, ready to move on, but Rosh was just taking a nice, meaty pause before: “Or should I say: Acting Director Dakota Prentiss.”

  That stopped me.

  He was still going. “I MUST NEEDS get my eyes checked one of these days, what with all these people I keep not recognizing—”

  “No—Rosh—what did you just say?”

  He sputtered. We were going off script, right as he was finding his groove.

  “W-what?”

  “‘Acting Director’? What—”

  “Oh. Um—a, just a joke. That’s me: jokes. Bad ones, usually.” He gave a thin, reedy laugh. I stared at him, unblinking. He caved right away. “I don’t know, Dak! Something Harrison was saying when he came through. He was laughing, so, so I assumed … Is, is that bad?”

  It wasn’t bad, per se. But it was more attention than I wanted. Another red flag. I turned and walked off to the next station without giving him an answer.

  * * *

  NATURALLY, IT was Lauren’s checkpoint I was dreading the most. The Rhinestone Cowboy was draped over its chair, as always, and I approached it as I would a lion I had been ordered to tame. No fear. Let it maul me if it must. I had a whip, at least, to protect me:

  I was just gonna tell the truth.

  Cccrackle. “Please put on the apparatus and apply the electrodes to the appropriate areas.”

  “Okay, Lauren? We gotta talk.” I sat down, cradling the Cowboy in my hands.

  Cccrackle. “I’m sorry but there is a mandated order of events. First you put on the apparatus and apply the electrodes to the appropriate areas—”