by Neil Clarke
Chinese guy, the contractor. Laconic. Mostly he just made faces, waved his hands. But I knew what he was saying. With a building like this, cheap steel and bad composite? If Colm started blasting soundwaves through the structure, that could bring the whole place crumbling down.
“According to our engineer’s report . . . ” Colm began. Still playing the coolheaded soldier. But the contractor wasn’t having it. The guy spun in his folding chair, smacking the side of the tent to make the projected image shiver and ripple. He said a word in Chinese that the software couldn’t handle. No one needed a translation. I mean, who were we going to trust? Some pointy-headed engineer’s report, delivered out of an Atlanta office? Or the guy who actually built the buildings?
This was getting ugly.
At this point, Karen felt obliged to remind everyone that I, the company investigator, had arrived, and that I, the company investigator, was technically in charge. “What we need to do,” she told them, “is understand this situation. Only then will we know how to proceed.”
And this is when things got weird.
Because everyone in the tent suddenly got this funny look, like kids with a dirty secret. After about a minute of awkward silence, Colm pushed a binder across the table, the kind with a thumbprint lock.
“I think you’ll want to take a look at this,” he said.
Carter, it’s time for another hard truth.
I know how things look from the home office. One big spreadsheet. Data points. And one of those data points is the head count.
Twenty squatters cleared from woodlands in South Dakota. Eighty squatters cleared from unfinished townhouses in Jalisco. Seven hundred squatters cleared from an abandoned soccer stadium in Jakarta.
Numbers.
But when you’re in the field, you’re not thinking about numbers. You’re thinking about networks, groups, social dynamics.
A squatter community is just that, a community. And every community has one, for better or worse: a leader. When you do a site clearance, that’s the person you want to talk to.
“I sent you an email.” Colm looked at Karen as she thumbed open the binder. “Also a voicemail. You’ve been on the phone five hours straight. Anyway, there’s been a development. Turns out you were right. This is very far from an ordinary site clearance.”
Karen flipped open the binder. The first thing I saw was a dark face. Male, middle-aged. Could have been from any country in the world.
“That’s Abdul Shah,” said Colm.
“Arabic?” I guessed.
“American. Parents were Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. Immigrated when he was a baby.”
Karen flipped through the file. Again, Carter, you have all this information, but I’ll give the rundown. Abdul Shah, until about half a year ago, was the type and epitome of nobody special. Grew up in Brooklyn, went to serve in Afghanistan in oh-eight. Seems to have been a typical kid, living for basketball and video games, till an IED flipped his truck on the road to Kandahar. After his discharge in twenty-ten, he took to wandering. Drifted down to the Caribbean, disappeared for a while, seems to have lived full-time as a beach bum. He shows up next in a Stanford MOOC on introductory neuroscience. In his forties, he goes back to Iraq as a visitor, then on to India. Tracing his roots, maybe. A decade later, he pops up in Sumatra. That’s where he set about making himself a gigantic pain in our asses.
“That stint on Hassel Island,” Colm said, “is where he seems to have developed his ideas.”
“Ideas?” I didn’t like where this was heading.
Colm gave me a look, like: Don’t play stupid with me, you know how it is.
I know how it is. We all know how it is. The people, the rootless people, the infinite people . . .
They say demographic growth is slowing, even reversing. That’s no comfort to the billions of people caught between the trendlines. They wander from place to place with no jobs, no prospects, no home-sweet-home. I’ve heard there are more homeless in some countries than there are people with legal shelter.
Cities won’t hold ‘em. Countryside can’t support ‘em. What they’re looking for, mostly, is a reason to keep going. I know it sounds trite. But some clichés are like dirt and death; there’s no getting rid of them. People, rich or poor, need something to believe in.
“So this guy,” Karen said, tapping the binder, “Abdul Shah, he’s some kind of a . . . ”
“He’s a crank,” said Colm.
“A prophet,” said the police chief.
“I was going to say ‘guru,’ ” Karen said.
Colm pointed at the projected image of the tower. “He holed up there in August. Started preaching whatever it is he preaches. By September, he had about a hundred followers. By December, four hundred. Now there’s a whole congregation in there. They never leave the building. And that’s how we get to this lovely situation we’re in today.”
“So this is no simple squatter population,” I said. “This is more of a—”
“A cult,” said Colm.
“A temple,” said the police chief.
“This is getting interesting,” Karen said.
I asked Colm, “When you say ‘preaching’ . . . ”
Colm waved. “So far as we can tell, Shah is offering a fairly standard cocktail of bullshit. Touch of Islam, touch of Buddhism, touch of neuroscience. You know these guys. They grab a bit of the old, a bit of the new, stir it all together and act like they’ve discovered a whole new religion. The full profile hasn’t yet been established—”
“Meaning you have no idea what he actually believes.”
“The full profile hasn’t yet been established,” Colm repeated, giving a military stress to each word, “but we believe Abdul Shah’s ideas tend toward the apocalyptic.”
Great. Within four hours of getting off the plane, I’d gone from running a squatter relocation to quelling a thousand-member suicide cult. “What about a cordon? Can we cut them off? How are they supplied?”
“You want to try a siege?” This was the prospective tenant, sounding seriously piqued. His company was supposed to be on the property by year’s end.
“A siege could be a problem,” Colm said. “Not because of the tower. Because of what’s happening outside the tower.”
“These people have attracted support,” said the chief, “from the local community.”
“They bring offerings,” Karen said. “Donations. Food and water. I noticed that when I came in.”
I remembered that ring of debris around the tower’s base. Except, as I realized, it wasn’t debris at all.
Those jugs, those bales of supplies, they were offerings. Tribute.
Worse and worse.
“Not to mention new recruits,” said Colm. “They show up every day. Word’s gotten out. This guy’s being greeted as some kind of visionary. A problem like this, it gets worse before it gets better. We need to nip this in the bud.”
What we needed, I was thinking, was to get these crazies off our proverbial lawn. After that they could do whatever they wanted. Suicide cult or second coming or whatever.
“I told you.” The police chief made a swinging motion, wielding an imaginary whip or club. “My guys, this is their job. Three riot teams, one at each major entrance. We can clear the building in a day.”
“Sonics,” said Colm. “Trust me. Quick and clean.”
They went back and forth, an argument I’d heard a hundred times. Still, I had a feeling, like there was something I’d forgotten.
“What about the first teams?” I asked. “The survey teams? The people Karen sent in?”
“What about them?” Colm said.
“Don’t they have anything to tell us? What have they learned about the situation?”
Silence. They were all making eyes at each other, even the guys who’d been arguing before. It gave me a shivery sensation, like with all the weird things I’d heard, I still hadn’t grasped how crazy this situation was.
“The other teams,” Colm said at last,
speaking slowly to emphasize how slow-witted I was, “haven’t come back out.”
“And that,” said Karen, slapping shut the profile of Abdul Shah, “is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
3
Here I am again, Carter, back from a sandwich run. A man can’t live on whiskey and Coke alone.
Maybe it’s the tropical climate. But there’s something ceremonial about these buildings of ours, don’t you think? Hotels, malls, offices, resorts: they all have the same monolithic appearance. Glassy slabs, smooth, sky high. An alien visitor might take them for memorials. Memorializing what, he’d have to wonder?
That’s what I thought when I stood underneath Shah’s tower. It was oddly like a ziggurat, the way it narrowed in stages. Glass and stone for the first hundred feet, then composite and plywood, then a skeletal spire rising toward the sun. Where, I wondered, would Master Shah make his home? Was he the kind of cult leader who’d need to be close to heaven? Topmost floor, high in the South Asian clouds? Or the kind of elusive crackpot who’d want to burrow deep, behind a nest of barricades and guns?
Karen and I were standing on the cement platform, just outside the ring of donations. Up close, I could see that the stuff was almost all food, the kind of rations starving people receive. Sacks of rice, jugs of water, unappetizing cubes of processed fish.
“How long do we wait here?” I asked Karen. She gave an impatient little hiss.
In the tent, Karen had told me her plan. Her morning hadn’t been idle. In the five hours she’d spent on the phone—five hours she’d been failing to get Colm’s messages—Karen had made contact with a mole inside the tower. If this person could be trusted, one of us would soon be inside.
The typical squatter camp is a sobering place. But not a dangerous place. I don’t know what they tell you in the home office, but the rule in the field is that you minimize provocation. The first teams we send in are like embassies, establishing what you might call diplomatic relations. The optimal process is to strike a deal, arrange for relocation, offer payouts, alternate housing. It’s only when things break down that a guy like Colm steps in.
Later, we send in the survey teams, medics, engineers, toxin abatement. All told, about twenty-five people might enter a building of this size.
None of them, so far, had come back out.
“So what’s your theory?” I looked over at Karen, who’d switched from coffee to pep pills. “What are we looking at here? Mass murder? Cannibalism?”
Karen sighed. In the command center, she’d played a message, first and only communication from within Shah’s tower. It had been sent by a woman named Shayreen Scott, point person on the last survey team. Her message was nineteen seconds long.
*****transcriber’s note: file #AB112235 intercut*****
“Hi, everyone. I’m fine, but I want you to know that I and the other team members have decided to stay with this group for now. Please don’t worry about us or send anyone else into the tower. For the time being, I think it’s best if we break off contact.”
*****end intercut file*****
“Now if that’s a hostage message,” Karen said, “it sure doesn’t sound like one.”
It didn’t sound like one to me, either. What it sounded like was a surefire sign that Shayreen Scott and her team had gone completely batty.
Thankfully, Karen had ignored Shayreen’s request. She’d established contact. For four and a half hours, she’d run automatic redial on Shayreen’s phone. For half an hour, she’d held a frustrating conversation. By the time Karen picked me up at the airport, terms had been established.
One person—one member of our team—would be allowed to enter the tower.
Me.
Oh, Karen put up a good argument. She was the better negotiator. She had more experience on-site. But she also hadn’t rested in the better part of a week.
I pulled rank.
So here I stood in the shadow that Shah’s tower cast like a gnomon on its surrounding dial of donations, looking at the glass doors reinforced with plywood, the rows of covered windows.
“How long do I have?”
Karen checked her phone. “If you go in now? Fifty-four minutes. I’ll try to get you more.”
Fifty-four minutes. Less than an hour until the local police chief moved in with his clubs and gas. Sparking, most likely, a riot. Or mass suicide. Or worse.
“There’s the signal,” Karen said, looking at her phone.
“Wish me luck.” I was already walking.
“Doug?” Karen resembled a squatter herself, standing there in her week-old clothes. She waggled her phone. “Keep in touch.”
I had three phones on my person. One in my pocket. A bug taped to my chest. And a third, my only genuinely secret one, the miniphone I carried in a place I felt confident no one would check.
I nodded at Karen and turned away.
As I walked into the shadow of Abdul Shah’s tower, I thought of my kids. Two little girls. Except they weren’t little girls, they were grown-up women, and I often wondered where exactly I’d been while that was happening.
But I knew.
I’d been doing shit like this.
The plywood slid aside as I came close. The door cracked open just wide enough for me to enter. No one stood on the far side. No smiling face popped out to welcome me. Only darkness and a breath of dusty air came from within Abdul Shah’s bizarre temple.
I stepped inside.
4
The first thing that happened was a woman’s voice said, “Stop.” I heard a scrape, a clink of chains. Someone locked the door behind me. The light from outside disappeared. A bulb came on, faint and ghostly, one of those rechargeable lanterns the survey teams carry. The woman stepped forward.
“Shayreen Scott,” I said, recognizing her face from the file.
She smiled.
I’ll tell you what the file says, Carter. It says that Shayreen Scott, until she picked up this assignment, was a perfectly unexceptional nine-to-fiver. Someone who filed her reports, logged her expenses, never slacked off or did a lick of extra work. The pragmatic type.
That didn’t fit with the woman I saw now. She had the eyes—kooky eyes. Fanatical. And a smile, broad, scary, like a born-again believer.
She’d been in this place for all of eighteen hours.
“Over there.” Shayreen pointed into the gloom. “You can leave your phone.”
By ‘can,’ I figured, she meant, ‘you’d better.’ The room was an unfinished lobby, cheaply constructed. Against one wall, they had a pile of phones, headsets, gadgets, laptops, watches. Every type of personal tech, dumped on the floor in no discernible order. I wondered how to keep my phone from disappearing in the mix.
“I wouldn’t worry.” Shayreen noticed my hesitation. “You won’t be wanting that thing back, anyway.”
Because in another few minutes, her tone implied, I’d have other matters on my mind.
A kind of marble slab, an unfinished desk, stood near the wall. I set my phone on top, noticing a slew of other phones already there, gathering dust, some of them among the newest models.
“Hold it.” Shayreen turned me around. Gently, like she’d noticed a tarantula on my chest. “Thought so.” She opened my collar and found the wire. “You should understand,” she said, as she picked at the tape, “this isn’t a matter of security. This is for your own benefit.”
No doubt. Shayreen set the bug on the desk, ready for later pickup.
“Ready? This way.”
It was like a theme-park ride, that building. I used to go to those places with my daughters, Disney World, Universal Studios. They always bring you through a little tunnel before you go on the big attractions. Putting you in the mood, making a break from the outside world. The halls in Shah’s tower had carpet on the floors, frosted glass wall sconces, rows of closed doors. I tried to picture the people who had lived here—until I remembered that, till now, nobody ever had.
In three turns we came to an elevator bank.
Shayreen hit the button. “You have electricity,” I blurted, forgetting this had been in the case file. Not that pirated electrics are unusual.
Shayreen nodded. “Some.”
“But no lights.”
“No lights,” she said, in a way that made me understand this was intentional.
Even in the elevator, no overheads came on. Which meant they had done some tricky things with the wiring. “Would you mind explaining to me,” I said, “what’s going on?”
“Distractions.” Shayreen gestured at the overheads. “They’re very deliberate about limiting distractions. This?” She held up her lantern. I wasn’t sure if she meant the light itself, or me, or the whole situation. “This is an exception.”
“Listen.” I got close, dropping my voice. “If you’re in any danger here, if you’re being held prisoner . . . ”
Shayreen gave no answer. Only a glance of those kooky eyes.
“Here we are.”
We’d come to a high floor, not quite the top. I heard a faint noise, a distant thumping. Wind.
Shayreen turned down a dark hall. Over her shoulder, I saw light at the end, crooked lines that shifted and changed. It was one of the tower windows, blocked with a board that thumped and trembled in the shore breeze.
We left the hall. You’ll have to forgive me, Carter. This is where I start to doubt my own memories. I’m hard-pressed to swear that all of this really happened.
The building, at this height, was far from finished—essentially, a metal-and-mineral shell. Along the naked ceiling, bundles of wires ran, hooked to lights that no one was using. Stacks of brick lay all around. The floor was bare cement, the internal walls incomplete. Far off, I saw rows of glimmering squares, outlines of boarded-up windows.
But I couldn’t see much else. The place was packed, filled with shreds of hanging sheet. Clear rubber, tent material, bedsheets, even those rubbery strips they have in grocery stores. They hung from the ceiling, dividing the space into tent-like chambers, a maze of gauzy makeshift cells.
And in those cells, quiet and still, lay the people.