Authority (2 page)

It always started well, even though it didn’t always end well.

The Voice had also neglected to mention that Area X lay beyond a border that still,
after more than thirty years, no one seemed to understand. No, he’d only picked up
on that when reviewing the files and in the needless replication from the orientation
video.

Nor had he known that the assistant director would hate him so much for replacing
the missing director. Although he should have guessed; according to the scraps of
information in her file, she had grown up lower-middle class, had gone to public school
at first, had had to work harder than most to get to her current position. While Control
came with whispers about being part of a kind of invisible dynasty, which naturally
bred resentment. There was no denying that fact, even if, up close, the dynasty was
more like a devolving franchise.

“They’re ready. Come with me.”

Grace, conjured up again, commanding him from the doorway.

There were, he knew, several different ways to break down a colleague’s opposition,
or their will. He would probably have to try all of them.

Control picked up two of the three files from the table and, gaze now locked in on
the biologist, tore them down the middle, feeling the torque in his palms, and let
them fall into the wastebasket.

A kind of choking sound came from behind him.

Now he turned—right into the full force of the assistant director’s wordless anger.
But he could see a wariness in her eyes, too. Good.

“Why are you still keeping paper files, Grace?” he asked, taking a step forward.

“The director insisted. You did that for a reason?”

He ignored her. “Grace, why are none of you comfortable using the words
alien
or
extraterrestrial
to talk about Area X?” He wasn’t comfortable with them, either. Sometimes, since
he’d been briefed on the truth, he’d felt a great, empty chasm opening up inside of
him, filled with his own screams and yelps of disbelief. But he’d never tell. He had
a face for playing poker; he’d been told this by lovers and by relatives, even by
strangers. About six feet tall. Impassive. The compact, muscular build of an athlete;
he could run for miles and not feel it. He took pride in a good diet and enough exercise,
although he did like whiskey.

She stood her ground. “No one’s sure. Never prejudge the evidence.”

“Even after all this time? I only need to interview one of them.”

“What?” she asked.

Torque in hands transformed into torque in conversation.

“I don’t need the other files because I only need to question one of them.”

“You need all three.” As if she still didn’t quite understand.

He swiveled to pick up the remaining file. “No. Just the biologist.”

“That is a mistake.”

“Seven hundred and fifty-three isn’t a mistake,” he said. “Seven hundred and twenty-two
isn’t a mistake, either.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Something is wrong with you.”

“Keep the biologist in there,” he said, ignoring her but adopting her syntax.
I know something you don’t.
“Send the others back to their quarters.”

Grace stared at him as if he were some kind of rodent and she couldn’t decide whether
to be disgusted or pitying. After a moment, though, she nodded stiffly and left.

He relaxed, let out his breath. Although she had to accept his orders, she still controlled
the staff for the next week or two, could check him in a thousand ways until he was
fully embedded.

Was it alchemy or a true magic? Was he wrong? And did it matter, since if he was wrong,
each was exactly like the others anyway?

Yes, it mattered.

This was his last chance.

His mother had told him so before he’d come here.

*   *   *

Control’s mother often seemed to him like a flash of light across a distant night
sky. Here and gone, gone and here, and always remembered; perhaps wondered what it
had been—what had caused the light. But you couldn’t truly
know
it.

An only child, Jackie Severance had followed her father into the service and excelled;
now she operated at levels far above anything her father, Jack Severance, had achieved,
and he had been a much-decorated agent. Jack had brought her up sharp, organized,
ready to lead. For all Control knew, Grandpa had made Jackie do tire obstacle courses
as a child, stab flour sacks with bayonets. There weren’t a whole lot of family albums
from which to verify. Whatever the process, he had also bred into her a kind of casual
cruelty, an expectation of high performance, and a calculated quality that could manifest
as seeming indifference to the fate of others.

As a distant flash of light, Control admired her fiercely, had, indeed, followed her,
if at a much lower altitude … but as a parent, even when she was around, she was unreliable
about picking him up from school on time or remembering his lunches or helping with
homework—rarely consistent on much of anything important in the mundane world on this
side of the divide. Although she had always encouraged him in his headlong flight
into and through the service.

Grandpa Jack, on the other hand, had never seemed fond of the idea, had one day looked
at him and said, “I don’t think he has the temperament.” That assessment had been
devastating to a boy of sixteen, already set on that course, but then it made him
more determined, more focused, more tilted skyward toward the light. Later he thought
that might have been why Grandpa had said it. Grandpa had a kind of unpredictable
wildfire side, while his mother was an icy blue flame.

When he was eight or nine, they’d gone up to the summer cottage by the lake for the
first time—“our own private spy club,” his mother had called it. Just him, his mother,
and Grandpa. There was an old TV in the corner, opposite the tattered couch. Grandpa
would make him move the antenna to get better reception. “Just a little to the left,
Control,” he’d say. “Just a little more.” His mother in the other room, going over
some declassified files she’d brought from the office. And so he’d gotten his nickname,
not knowing Grandpa had stolen it from spy jargon. As that kid, he’d held that nickname
close as something cool, something his grandpa had given him out of love. But he was
still astute enough not to tell anyone outside of family, even his girlfriends, for
many years. He’d let them think that it was a sports nickname from high school, where
he’d been a backup quarterback. “A little to the right now, Control.” Throw that ball
like a star. The main thing he’d liked was knowing where the receivers would be and
hitting them. Even if always better during practice, he had found a pure satisfaction
in that kind of precision, the geometry and anticipation.

When he grew up, he took “Control” for his own. He could feel the sting of condescension
in the word by then, but would never ask Grandpa if he’d meant it that way, or some
other way. Wondered if the fact he’d spent as much time reading in the cottage by
the lake as fishing had somehow turned his grandfather against him.

So, yes, he’d taken the name, remade it, and let it stick. But this was the first
time he’d told his coworkers to call him “Control” and he couldn’t say why, really.
It had just come to him, as if he could somehow gain a true fresh start.

A little to the left, Control, and maybe you’ll pick up that flash of light.

*   *   *

Why an empty lot? This he’d wondered ever since seeing the surveillance tape earlier
that morning. Why had the biologist returned to an empty lot rather than her house?
The other two had returned to something personal, to a place that held an emotional
attachment. But the biologist had stood for hours and hours in an overgrown lot, oblivious
to anything around her. From watching so many suspects on videotape, Control had become
adroit at picking up on even the most mundane mannerism or nervous tic that meant
a signal was being passed on … but there was nothing like that on the tape.

Her presence there had registered with the Southern Reach via a report filed by the
local police, who’d picked her up as a vagrant: a delayed reaction, driven by active
searching once the Southern Reach had picked up the other two.

Then there was the issue of terseness versus terseness.

753. 722.

A slim lead, but Control already sensed that this assignment hinged on the details,
on detective work. Nothing would come easy. He’d have no luck, no shit-for-brains
amateur bomb maker armed with fertilizer and some cut-rate version of an ideology
who went to pieces within twenty minutes of being put in the interrogation room.

During the preliminary interviews before it was determined who went on the twelfth
expedition, the biologist had, according to the transcripts in her file, managed to
divulge only 753 words. Control had counted them. That included the word
breakfast
as a complete answer to one question. Control admired that response.

He had counted and recounted the words during that drawn-out period of waiting while
they set up his computer, issued him a security card, presented to him passwords and
key codes, and went through all of the other rituals with which he had become overly
familiar during his passage through various agencies and departments.

He’d insisted on the former director’s office despite Grace’s attempts to cordon him
off in a glorified broom closet well away from the heart of everything. He’d also
insisted they leave everything as is in the office, even personal items. She clearly
disliked the idea of him rummaging through the director’s things.

“You are a little off,” Grace had said when the others had left. “You are not all
there.”

He’d just nodded because there was no use denying it was a little strange. But if
he was here to assess and restore, he needed a better idea of how badly it had all
slipped—and as some sociopath at another station had once said, “The fish rots from
the head.” Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven,
but point taken.

Control had immediately taken a seat behind the battering ram of a desk, among the
clutter of piles and piles of folders, the ramble of handwritten notes and Post-its …
in the swivel chair that gave him such a great panoramic view of the bookcases against
the walls, interspersed with bulletin boards overlaid with the sediment of various
bits of paper pinned and re-pinned until they looked more like oddly delicate yet
haphazard art installations. The room smelled stale, with a slight aftertaste of long-ago
cigarettes.

Just the size and weight of the director’s computer monitor spoke to its obsolescence,
as did the fact that it had died decades ago, thick dust layered atop it. It had been
halfheartedly shoved to the side, two shroud-shadows on the calendar blotter beneath
describing both its original location and the location of the laptop that had apparently
supplanted it—although no one could now find that laptop. He made a mental note to
ask if they had searched her home.

The calendar dated back to the late nineties; was that when the director had started
to lose the thread? He had a sudden vision of her in Area X with the twelfth expedition,
just wandering through the wilderness with no real destination: a tall, husky, forty-year-old
woman who looked older. Silent, conflicted, torn. So devoured by her responsibility
that she’d allowed herself to believe she owed it to the people she sent into the
field to join them. Why had no one stopped her? Had no one cared about her? Had she
made a convincing case? The Voice hadn’t said. The maddeningly incomplete files on
her told Control nothing.

Everything in what he saw showed that she had cared, and yet that she had cared not
at all about the functioning of the agency.

Nudging his knee on the left, under the desk: the hard drive for the monitor. He wondered
if that had stopped working back in the nineties, too. Control had the feeling he
did not want to see the rooms the hardware techs worked in, the miserable languishing
corpses of the computers of past decades, the chaotic unintentional museum of plastic
and wires and circuit boards. Or perhaps the fish did rot from the head, and only
the director had decomposed.

So, sans computer, his own laptop not yet deemed secure enough, Control had done a
little light reading of the transcripts from the induction interviews with the members
of the twelfth expedition. The former director, in her role as psychologist, had conducted
them.

The other recruits had been uncappable, unstoppable geysers in Control’s opinion:
Great chortling, hurtling, cliché-spouting babblers. People who by comparison could
not hold their tongues … 4,623 words … 7,154 words … and the all-time champion, the
linguist who had backed out at the last second, coming in at 12,743 words of replies,
including a heroically prolonged childhood memory “about as entertaining as a kidney
stone exploding through your dick,” as someone had scrawled in the margin. Which left
just the biologist and her terse 753 words. That kind of self-control had made him
look not just at the words but at the pauses between them. For example: “I enjoyed
all of my jobs in the field.” Yet she had been fired from most of them. She thought
she had said nothing, but every word—even
breakfast
—created an opening. Breakfast had not gone well for the biologist as a child.

The ghost was right there, in the transcripts since her return, moving through the
text. Things that showed themselves in the empty spaces, making Control unwilling
to say her words aloud for fear that somehow he did not really understand the undercurrents
and hidden references. A detached description of a thistle … A mention of a lighthouse.
A sentence or two describing the quality of the light on the marshes in Area X. None
of it should have gotten to him, yet he felt her there, somehow, looking over his
shoulder in a way not evoked by the interviews with the other expedition members.