What in the hell is going on? he thought frantically.
The candle flickered, and Tom glanced at it again. A smell wafted over to him. It was a sweet smell, a ripe smell that he couldn’t identify. It didn’t make any sense. The candle was vanilla-scented. It was a smell he and Peggy both enjoyed, along with Autumn Spice, Apple Pie, and Desert Rose, a smell that had filled the room earlier that evening.
Something was wrong.
Peggy was staring at the candle, too. He had seen her profile a thousand times over the years—a hundred thousand times—and he knew it as well as his own reflection. But there was something different about it now. Different in the same subtle way that the smell of the candle was different. It was clearly Peggy sitting in the rocker . . . and yet it wasn’t. Something was missing, or something had been added—something that changed her entirely and made her a stranger.
Tom jumped as another scream split the night. Was it someone else making a similar discovery? Was it someone he and Peggy knew, someone in their circle of friends, someone, maybe, who had spent the night on their futon?
He had sent his wife out here to do something. Now he bent over to do it himself. He felt Peggy’s eyes watching him. He could feel them crawling on his skin like beetles. His eyes looked up at the window, and from this angle he could see the moon. It was different, too. The shape was right, but the colour was all wrong. Tom took two deep breaths, one to steady himself and one to do what needed to be done.
Just pretend it’s your birthday, he told himself.
Peggy whispered, “Make a wish.”
He blew out the candle.
through the door
SUSAN IOANNU
Imagine a filigreed keyhole
the shape of a corset
or hourglass
and a silver key,
the handle a circle
head notched like an axe.
(Word-sharp,
did it cut off
the corset’s neck, perhaps?)
On one side
blood is dripping
into a stained, glass shell.
Fine white logic
sifts in the other
a radiant children’s pile.
Chaos blooms into order,
and order implodes
to a flash.
Form is flow,
and energy, matter
the keyhole’s inseparable halves.
Both sides
lock up one Garden
we wander and wonder in.
signal to noise
GEMMA FILES
. . . reckon not those who are killed in Allah’s way as dead; nay, they are alive (and) are provided sustenance from their Lord.
Never think that those who have perished in jihad are dead—they are still here. You are simply unaware of them.
—Alternate translations of Qu’ran Excerpt 3:169,
Set 11, Count 32.
Two months after Cal Fichtner took himself officially “off the map,” Greer Reizendaark logged onto the Company webmail account to find a particularly well-scrubbed piece of e-correspondence waiting for him. No header, no address, no send-date—just a numerical link embedded in the body, with this curt instruction: LIVE AT ONE. CLICK HERE.
He waited ’til the clock at the corner of his screen rolled over, then did—and watched the whole way through, without comment, not stopping even when some newbie from Homeland Security caught a couple of seconds’ glance at it over his shoulder, and started puking. “Holy Christ,” she kept on repeating. “Holy, holy Christ.”
Greer didn’t turn around. Just snapped back, as the footage froze, looped and started over: “That’s exactly what they want you to say, you dizzy cunt.”
For I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads, and strike off every fingertip of them—Excerpt 8:012, Set 28, Count 62.
The dhimmi, the Crusaders, the Jews: make ’em too afraid to fight you, to resist the tide of jihad, by showing them just how bad they were gonna die, if they did.
The funny thing, though? Fichtner didn’t even look all that scared, in the clip—stayed a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch, right up to and including the part where they stuck a knife between his top two vertebrae, and started sawing away at his spine. Like it hurt, yes; mad, for damn certain . . .
He’d known all along this was the likeliest outcome, though. Hadn’t needed Greer to tell him that.
Hadn’t let him, when he’d tried.
This world was full of empty spaces, especially where the maps fell away—holes that most often plugged themselves with phantoms, the minute you looked somewhere else. Nature of the game. Nothing was certain, only wars and rumours of wars, ’til the intelligence checked out.
Or, as his last wife liked to put it: “You’re physically present sometimes, but you’re not really here, Greer—not ever. You’re not just a spook, you’re a ghost.”
“That’s a cliché, darlin’.”
“You’d know,” she said.
Sheikh Mehdi Nebbou called a half hour after Fichtner’s execution, to demand: “Why were you not watching him, Greer?”
“Other shit on my plate, buddy. As goddamn usual.”
Greer certainly had been, in the beginning—no big secret there. Because while Fichtner might’ve been righteously quick to drop his GPS-enabled cellphone in the very next dry well he saw, he’d already known (as Greer had taught him) how the basic fun of surveillance came from realizing you could track anybody, anywhere, so long as you had a fair idea of who they were likely to be hanging around with. People always made the best anchors.
So if somebody’d wanted to find Fichtner, all they’d ever had to do was watch the clinic Fichtner’s new lady worked at, then wait for him to turn up somewhere in the background. Or hell, they could just watch Mehdi himself, who’d offered Fichtner a job as a “security consultant” the week after Fichtner tendered his resignation.
But things had gotten hot elsewhere, like they always did, and Greer’s attention had shifted, accordingly. Wasn’t like the interest ever seemed much reciprocated, since Fichtner certainly knew—had known—his home phone number, and Greer’d made sure not to have it changed in the interim, just in case his wayward protégé ever felt inclined to ring him up for a little chat.
“They killed his fiancée, as well,” Mehdi said. “Miss Al-Kimani—the nurse? Though I suppose it might be asking too much to think—”
“Don’t tell me what I do and don’t care about, you supercilious S.O.B. You were the one s’posed to look after him now, remember? Your territory, your rules. He trusted you.”
“If you had only trusted me, Greer—from the very beginning—then none of this would have happened,” Mehdi replied. Then rang off, leaving Greer with nothing in his Bluetooth but an oh-so-sophisticated lack of static.
Only the truth, whatever that was: just information, a wonderfully fluid thing. Given the right tools and impetus, you could move it around, cover it up, modify it—give it a fan made out of feathers and make it do the shimmy, if you wanted. That was what Greer did all day, every day, to earn his Christmas bonus . . . and what Mehdi did too, while saving for a considerably different holiday.
From Marathon to Peshawar, the same routine: guys like Mehdi and Greer put people into bad situations, hoping they’d find out what their governments didn’t already know they needed to know. Most times, the people got hurt. Sometimes they got killed. But the rules didn’t change, no matter what—whether you were getting the bulk of your covert intel with black magic tech, or an old-fashioned gun to the head.
By lunchtime, Greer was vetting three separate reports (Holland, Spain, Equatorial Africa) while simultaneously balls-deep in a three-way conference call with Washington, Toronto and London, listening to some CSIS asshole pontificate, and trying to chew his way through a cruller without it showing up on tape.
“You can see how this makes us look bad, Agent Reizendaark,” this guy said. “You
r Mr. Fichtner died for being a member of the global intelligence community.”
Now, there’s an oxymoron, Greer thought. And shot back—“‘My’ Mr. Fichtner? Hadn’t been that since I accepted his L.O.R., back in February.”
“They wrote ‘CIA BLOODSUCKER’ on the wall behind his corpse,” the designated representative from Greer’s side of the table pointed out.
“Outdated, then,” London broke in; “let’s not quibble over semantics, gentlemen. Particularly since I’m still not hearing anything about how you mean to deal with this particular—breach of protocol.”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
“Erase all trace of Fichtner, retroactively.”
“Looks to me like somebody already beat you to it,” Greer replied, punching out.
Two months ago. Greer still had that last call .mp3’d on his hard drive, somewhere—could listen to it later tonight, alone in his empty house, where the only company left for him to keep was with a dead man’s voice.
Fichtner: You get my message, G.?
Greer: Yeah, I got it. So . . . hear you’re growin’ a beard for real, prayin’ five times a day, and why? ’Cause Aqsa won’t let you up under her hijab if you don’t?
Fichtner: ’Cause I like it, Greer. ’Cause it feels right.
Greer: Uh huh. So what’s the part you like most, huh? The killing in the Name part? The eight-year-old human bombs?
Fichtner: I like the part says there is no God but God. Seems true to me, or like it should be. Might solve a fuck of a lot of problems, on either side, people just took it a bit more seriously. . . .
Greer: Some people already take it a bit too seriously for comfort, you ask me.
Fichtner: . . . and the rest? That’s mostly misinformation, misinterpretation. People thinking they always know better. (Pause) Sound familiar?
Greer: Fuck you, son.
Fichtner: Can’t do that sort of thing no more, G. Sorry.
Greer: No matter how drunk I get you, first?
Fichtner: Can’t do that either, buddy.
Greer: Well, hell, buddy—that sure ain’t no kinda religion I’d be willin’ to die for, but to each his damn own. (Pause) ’Cause they are gonna kill you, Cal . . . that’s the no-God-but-God’s honest truth. Her too, probably. You do know that, right?
Fichtner: Well, if they do, they do. I mean, Aqsa’s been living with this shit a whole lot longer than either of us, Greer—she’s stronger than I’ll ever be. Plus, at least she tries not to hate.
Greer: You really think the two of you’re gonna end up in the same place, though, after? Given all you done?
Fichtner: (Long pause) Maybe not. But that’s the hope.
And here the mental transcript broke off.
To wash the conference call’s aftertaste away, Greer hit the Geek Room, where his two pet surveillance experts—one male, one female, so he always just called ’em Guy and Gal, in his head—were poring over the latest input from a bunch of gyro-stabilized recon ex-satellite cameras Mehdi had agreed to retrofit onto some of his bosses’ “new” Navy P-3 Orions. As a vain stab at trying to keep things privateprivacy, the cameras got changed around weekly, which meant Guy and Gal spent most days downloading intel, plugging it into a 360-degree spread and then trying to figure out from the resultant virtual landscape just where and when said footage had been snatched, as well as what the hell was (probably) going on in it.
Today’s spread showed a meet-up somewhere in the desert (big surprise), though Guy and Gal were having trouble deciding exactly which one. Scans showed two vans, three open-end trucks and a yoinked U.S. Army Humvee ’round which figures in robes and head-scarves filtered, their faces all equally blown out by harsh light and sudden shadow.
“We think this one’s Ajinabi,” Gal said, tapping what to Greer was an utterly random set of features. The name—an agreed-upon moniker floated first through Mehdi’s group, then adopted by Greer’s, after Fichtner started using it in his reports—was Arabic for either “stranger” or “outsider”: a legendary organizer for hire, possibly foreign-born, or even a Fichtner-style convert who’d chosen jihad over live-and-let-live. But on lack of background detail alone, Ajinabi’d quickly become scapegoat of choice in the region—a convenient catch-all for a complex range of mischief, everything from holding bomb-building classes to coordinating lethal actions.
“He might’ve been in on Fichtner, too, boss,” Guy suggested. “Or know who was.”
Greer shrugged. “Might’ve. Which is pretty much the same as sayin’ the boogeyman did it, ’cause we’ll never know no better.”
Gal frowned. “We figure out who some of the other players here are, though, and turn ’em—that’d get us one step closer.”
“Don’t look to me like there’s enough there for the facial-recognition software to work with, even if our current operatives database wasn’t so far out of date—”
Guy: “Oh, look at that. I think . . . we got a hit.”
They all studied the results for a while, silently. Until—
“That . . . looks like Cal Fichtner,” Gal said, at last.
“Couldn’t be, though.”
“. . . no.”
Damn, though, if it didn’t seem like it was. Right there in the background, half-hidden in a shadow cast by that second truck from the right—even down to choice of sunglasses, or that raggedly white-boy meth-cooker beard he’d grown so Aqsa would feel more at home letting him walk her down the street. Same stone-age vs. Star Trek outfit he’d last been photographed wearing, calculated for maximum blend-in when viewed from above; same guy got his head cut off on almost-live not-exactly-TV, and made it exciting enough to watch that the footage ended up being streamed on Al-Jazeera.
“Look, fellas,” Greer broke in, finally, “I’ve seen the man’s head. They sent it to us postage paid, packed in salt, care of my office.”
“What about the rest of him?”
“Out in the desert somewheres, I assume—the hell’s it matter? We got DNA, got a hundred per cent match. Whoever that is, Cal Fichtner don’t come into the matter.”
“Well,” Guy muttered, “it might be . . .” Then cut off in mid-breath as Gal shot him a dirty look, visual shorthand for shut effin’ up, you boob. Greer raised a brow, angled to include them both.
“Might be what?”
Gal sighed. “Sometimes . . . data stays behind. Like . . . when you overwrite stuff again and again, fragments stick around, in the interstices. They just sort of collect.”
“‘Pixel-geists,’ we call ’em—”
“You do.”
“Whatever. So, stuff gets caught between the zeroes and the ones—I mean, so what, right? All part of the process.”
Greer shook his head, hoping that would help; it didn’t.
“Well . . . what do you do about it, when it does?” he asked, finally.
“Wait ’til it goes away again, mostly,” Guy replied.
That night, his BlackBerry chimed, and Greer opened it to find his inbox full of empty emails. At first he thought it was Fichtner’s killers trying to screw with him some more, but maybe not—these had addresses and time-signatures, though both jumped seemingly at random from past to present to future, ’round the world and back again. One was from Antarctica, for fuck’s sake. Greer shift-clicked the whole pile, hit delete. Then fell asleep watching football with one eye, BBC World News with the other, and head-first from there into a pile of dreams: blurry, brief, bitterly disturbing.
That awful room, a tiny concrete cell with corkboard walls, with nothing in it but a gashed-up slab-topped table and a camera-stand. And bloodstains, layered in over atop of each other, so deep they looked like wallpaper.
The Bluetooth buzzed against his cheek, hot with sweat. He reared back up, swatting at it, only to hear a voice he knew almost better than his own issuing from it—tiny and tinny, but distinct: internalized, like it was vibrating up through the bones of his jaw to reach the eardrum directly, its message’s content and d
elivery system alike both equally impossible.
Get my message, G?
“. . . What?”
Fichtner’s laugh, pricking tears from Greer’s eyes automatically, like a cold wind.
You—get—my message?
“Who is this?” No reply. “Listen, asshole, you need to get the hell off my line.”
Can’t do that. Sorry.
Greer knuckled his eyes, drawing sparks. “I . . . ain’t havin’ this conversation. You could be anybody, ’sides from—”
. . . me?
A long pause ensued, while Greer tried to figure out anything worth saying.
Maybe . . . not? the voice asked, gently.
“. . . can’t be.”
Well . . . seems true to me, or like it should be. Buddy.
Then silence. Not even a tone.
Greer sat there a while, thinking about how insane he must have gone without noticing, to actually believe that he might’ve talking to Cal Fichtner’s—what? Pixel-geist? Spook?
Around three-forty-five, he gave up on getting back to sleep, and called up Gal (who was still in the Geek Room, like he’d known she would be). Got her to send the spread over and went over it again—homed in on that tricksy little background figure, Blade Runner-style, and saw it was pointing straight at the same other silhouette Gal had initially tapped, exactly. “Ajinabi,” caught foreground-framed with his mouth open in mid-lecture, similarly faceless yet somehow more authoritative than the rest, judging by the way the others angled towards him. And totally ignorant of Fichtner’s finger cocked to the back of his head, like: Him. Here. See? This guy, and no one else . . .
. . . my message . . .
And then it was . . . later, and Greer surfaced to find himself somehow not only drunk as a lord, but already on the phone with Mehdi. Who was being surprisingly forbearing about it, given the circumstances.
“Things are still there even when you stop lookin’ at ’em, right?” Greer asked, pouring another drink he sure as hell didn’t need.
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