Skinner (4 page)

Now they all have something on their mind. The past.

Terrence takes a step sideways.

“What do you have for her?”

Cross pushes his empty hands across the desk, a man all in.

“Money. I have money for her.”

“She doesn’t need money.”

Haven touches the top of his head.

“
Doesn’t need money.”

Cross flicks his hand westward.

“She’s running around the desert in a forty-year-old Land Rover, living on a diet of amphetamines and psychedelics, playing with robots, and occasionally crawling to the edge of civilization to do whatever piecework visual analysis you manage to scrape up for her.”

His face tightens, brows drawing together, lips tensed.

“She is.”

He searches for the words to describe what she is and, finding them, spits them out.

“A wasted resource.”

No worse sin.

He exhales, looks at the ceiling, appears about to smile but does not.

“She’s what you have to offer us, Terrence.”

He looks down from the ceiling.

“You got her to leave Disaster City and go to Haiti. Either you can get her to go into the field for me or you cannot.”

Terrence thinks about Haiti. The Pelican Case full of cash. How heavy it was.

“There were lives to save in Haiti.”

Cross allows this.

“Are there not lives to be saved now?”

Terrence knows there are. A vast number of lives that may be saved.

Do they know?

Still holding the top page of the contract Cross has offered him, he folds it over once, a letter fold, and uses his thumb to sharpen the crease.

“If I can convince her. Security will be an issue.”

Eyes shooting to Haven and back to the paper.

“As I said. She won’t work with
him.
Obviously.”

Cross shakes his head.

“Haven has an asset already.”

Terrence doesn’t look at Haven.

“You have an asset.”

Haven lifts a finger.

“I have someone else for Jae.”

Terrence folds the paper over again.

“Rosalind?”

Cross shakes his head.

“We don’t like her for this. Too eccentric. Jae should travel with a stabilizing influence.”

Haven lifts three fingers.

“I have a team.”

Terrence sharpens the second crease.

“
Team
.”

“Sloan. The new guy. Everybody wants to work with him. And two others. She’ll be bracketed. Highest-value asset. Sloan and his team, they’re very good.”

Terrence looks at Cross.

“Jae won’t want anyone from Kestrel.”

Cross looks at the clocks over the door.

“You have someone new, Terrence? Looking to package this job? Take a commission on the asset
and
her protection?”

Terrence looks at the paper in his hands. It betrays no tremor, no sign of what is in his heart.
It’s not too late to stop,
he tells himself. But it is too late. And he wouldn’t stop even if he could.

The abyss is at his feet. He steps into it with a word.

“Skinner.”

The atmosphere in the room changes with the speaking of the name. One’s ears might pop.

The five clocks tick.

Cross touches a button on his keyboard, and Terrence knows that however many devices may have been recording their conversation to this point, they have all gone dead.

Cross looks at the surface of his black desk, magic mirror of an equally dark future.

“
Skinner is gone
.
You said.
Never to return.
You said.”

He looks up from the black desk.

“Was that not the truth?”

“I never said
dead
.”

For the first time since the conference began, Cross rises, fingertips pressing down bone-white on the black desktop.

“If he’d been dead that would have been the ideal outcome, wouldn’t it have been? The list of people unsatisfied with that result would have been brief indeed. Fuck. Terrence. If he were dead, you might still own this company.”

Terrence smiles.

“I doubt that very much.”

Cross appears to notice for the first time that he is standing. He lifts his hands from the desk, blood returning, pinking the skin.

“It’s an absurd notion. A nonstarter. No.”

Terrence looks at the carpet between his toes, nodding.

“Like I said, I’ll likely never have another chance to twist your balls. So. No Skinner, no Jae.”

Cross looks at the bank of clock faces.

“He’s not viable.”

Terrence looks at the clocks, watches a few seconds of Cross’s time whirl away.

“Jae can give
someone
the inside track on the West-Tebrum attackers. Once word gets out that you have her, she’ll be targeted. I won’t run her out there in the open without the best protection. So she gets Skinner. Or you can’t have her.”

Cross taps his teeth with his thumbnail, realizes what he’s doing, stops.

“So strident, Terrence. So urgent.”

He’s looking at the clocks again.

“I would be concerned about his focus on the present.”

Terrence is still holding the folded page of his contract. He opens it, glances inside, closes it.

“If he’d wanted to do something about Montmartre, he would have done it a long time ago. And you wouldn’t be here now.”

Cross looks at him.

“No. Neither of us would be here.”

He sits, and moves a manila folder to the center of his desk. Anachronistic luxury. He flips it open. A USB drive is taped inside the cover. From his angle, standing on the opposite side of the desk, Terrence can see a heavily redacted document, 70 percent thick black censor lines.

“What will he want?”

“Money.”

“Yes. And?”

Terrence is trying not to feel how carefully Haven is not looking at him. He tucks the contract away inside his jacket.

“An asset. That’s all he ever wanted.”

Cross closes the file.

“Such a
simple
man.”

He looks at the closed file, pushes it across the desk.

“Details. An op for Jae. Now. And yes.”

He looks at the clocks yet again, time the enemy.

“You can have Skinner.”

Haven rises, a single movement that seems to originate somewhere above his head, a force drawing him smoothly to his feet as his ankles and arms uncross.

“Are we talking about this?”

Cross looks at him, places a finger on the keyboard button he pressed minutes before.

“We have talked about it, Haven.”

He presses the button; recording resumed.

“And now we are done talking about it.”

Haven touches his fresh haircut.

“Opposed.”

He raises his voice slightly, speaks to the room.

“For the record.”

Cross types something, rapid fire.

“Events are moving quickly, Terrence. I have to leave for Europe. Constant status reports. American lives are at risk. Let’s do our best to protect them. Patriots.”

Haven is looking at Terrence now, very much so.

“
Patriots
,
Terrence. Remember to tell Skinner.”

Exiting through the killbox atrium, Terrence squeezes the USB drive from the file between his thumb and forefinger, secure in the knowledge that Cross and Haven know he lied. But that they only know the lies he wanted them to know. The other lie,
The Lie,
they didn’t catch that one, had no hope of catching it, or of catching him.

They are so smart. Such good liars themselves, they know when they are being lied to.

But I’m the one who taught them how to lie so well.

An hour later, in a Georgetown Internet café, he sends an email, calling Skinner back to the world.

The monster summoned, he starts waiting to die, and is soon on a Lufthansa flight to Cologne, speeding toward that end.

JAE HAS BEEN
parked across the highway from the motel for nearly an hour. She doesn’t want to go in. She’s begun to develop sores from sleeping in the Land Rover, not to mention an intimate sweaty reek that reminds her of day-old undergraduate sex, but she does not want to go in.

Still, a bed, a shower.

She should have both before she shows up at Creech.

It’s one thing to arrive two days late, another to show up reeking of road sweat, filthy from weeks of living in the desert, more than slightly wild-eyed: the residue of an admittedly ill-advised peyote experiment still wringing itself from her brain. The military expects a certain amount of eccentricity from freelance geniuses, but she suspects that she may have pushed somewhat beyond an acceptable level of quirks. Off in the desert, taking solo shamanistic journeys and playing with homemade robots. Over the border into crazy land. One of the many foreign lands where unsanctioned travel can result in one’s security clearances being revoked. A trip that ends with one’s file being moved from the
Watchers
drawer to the
Watched.

Jae does not want to be watched.

A bed. A shower.

She needs the job at Creech. Whatever it is, whatever it is they want her to see and understand for them, she needs the trickle of money it will release into her accounts. Money fuels her on the road. Keeps her off the grid and away from the torrents of media and information that swamp her compulsions, dragging her into an undertow of data that never resolves into the sense her mind insists is just below the surface. She needs to top off her account, check her PO box in Barstow, pick up some parts she ordered for the robots, speak to her dealer, maybe, and get back into the sand.

She’s gonna have to go in that fucking motel and look at its shitting cable TV, for fuck sake, whether she wants to or not. She raises the Nikon Prostaff 12x25 binoculars to her eyes and looks out at the motel. Battered by decades of desert sun. Parched wood. A shallow foundation perched on little more than sand and gravel. What would it take from wind or rain to turn this shit box into kindling? That’s the peyote talking, backwash of paranoia at the end of any lengthy trip. Fuck it. Take a look.

The Worm will tell her if there’s anything to fear.

She returns the binoculars to the case dangling off a strap looped around the glove box handle. Checklist time. She checks the laces of her trail boots, making sure they’re tight. She checks the pockets of her safari vest, confirming that they hold her Garmin GPSMAP 62, Motorola Brute cell phone, a Uniden GMRS Two-Way radio with thirty-six-mile desert range, Leatherman Skeletool, three twenty-four-hundred-calorie food bars, a solar blanket, and a 3.1-liter CamelBak hydration pouch clipped to the shoulder rings. Julbo Micropores PT sunglasses on her face and jungle hat on her head. Hair and fingernails clipped to utilitarian lengths. Underwear mostly clean.

She could laugh at herself.

If a sandstorm materializes out of nowhere and blows her over the rainbow or if the Frenchman Mountain Fault becomes active and opens a crevasse beneath her feet that sends her tumbling into a buried city or if frogs rain suddenly from the sky and destroy all civilization, she’ll be ready. She could really just laugh at herself. But she doesn’t. Intimately aware of how the unexpected and nigh on impossible can manifest and warp the fabric of one’s personal space and time.

She unbuckles her seatbelt, unlocks the door, pulls the lever, catching in her face the updraft of superheated air rising from the surface of the tarmac. She gets out, boots grinding sand into the road surface. The all-muffling silence of the desert. Standing still, disoriented by the lack of forward movement, she puts a hand on the roof of the Rover, burning her fingers. The motel, bed and shower inside, across the road.

The Worm will find the hidden dangers.

She circles around the battered Series III Lightweight, unlocks and opens the rear door, and peels the packing blanket away from the row of five black and silver Gator roadie cases. She pulls out the smallest of the cases and walks toward the motel. She walks in a jagged configuration of rights and lefts. She imagines her path viewed from above and traced by a satellite. An entirely likely proposition. The path, from that celestial viewpoint, reads as irregular biology. The EKG of a restless mind. Blood pressure under extreme duress. An erratic heart.

Twenty meters from the motel, well away from its awnings, in an area outside of the killing zone of a falling telephone pole or snapped high-tension line, she sets the case on the ground, flips, twists, unlocks two clasps, and raises the lid, revealing the coiled Worm inside. Thick as a garden hose, a black articulated whip of alloy, carbon fiber composite and Kevlar with a lidded cyclops eye at one end. Mounted into the interior of the case’s lid, an iPad loaded with her own Linux hack. Restraint webbing released so that she can slip her hand into the center coil of the Worm, she tugs slightly to free it from the snug foam nest. She has to get closer to the motel. A challenge made easier with the Worm in her hand; a comfort. She walks, teased by the high-tension hum overhead, taunted, refusing to look. It’s there, it wants to kill her. So what? Everything wants to kill her today. Five meters out from the motel, breathing deep, she stops.

Down on one knee, she gentles the Worm to the earth, its black coat instantly dusted with ultra-fine desert sand. She takes her Leatherman from its pocket, flips open an awl, uses the tip to slide open a tiny cover on the underside of the Worm, pokes the awl into a divot under the cover, sees a green LED come to life. She slides the cover closed, pockets the Leatherman, rises and backs away from the motel, returning to the open case. The iPad inside is already awake, roused when power tickled the Worm. She taps a squiggle icon, opens the Worm’s control panel, runs down a menu of search options, chooses a simple foundation inspection routine, and flicks the Worm alive.

In the dirt, it wriggles, the lid of the eye snapping open and shut as it rises to attention, half a meter of the Worm uncoiling and arching upward, swinging the lens about, mapping, gridding the surroundings, finding the motel at hand and darting in that direction, settling into the dirt, writhing, unspooling, moving exactly like what it is: an articulated robot snake. The inspection routine itself is simple, but running it requires a complex emotional contortion. Using the Worm and its cohorts in their cases leads inevitably to the contemplation of buildings blown up, shaken to the ground, washed from their foundations. And the very specific types of bodies to be found in these variously demolished structures. The dismemberments of explosions, the paste left as residue when several floors compress into one, the sea-wrinkled skin and seaweed hair rippling in brand-new currents running across what was, until recently, dry land.

The Worm twists, seals its single eye, and begin to burrow, a tight corkscrew drilling itself into the ground to discover the hidden faults of the motel’s foundations.

One of the pockets on her vest buzzes. The phone. Terrence. Why isn’t she at Creech? As if he doesn’t know why she’s not there. She’s not ready to be there. They want her eyes. They want to know what they can’t see. How dangerous it might be. How can she tell them anything if she doesn’t even have her eyes open yet? She’s like a newborn puppy now, fresh from the desert, eyes gummed shut. Terrence knows. He taught her how to do it. Open her eyes to the world, use her compulsions, let the information in. Don’t run from it, look at it.

Tell me what you see
,
he’d said.

And later,
Don’t go to Iraq.

But she’d gone anyway.

Shit.

If she told them, if she told them what she really sees, how truly dangerous it is, they wouldn’t believe her. Or, if they did, they would cease to function. They would freeze in their tracks, paralyzed by the fear. Disaster City, her old home, that was the model. What’s coming is the real thing, Disaster World.

She lets the phone vibrate, watches the telemetry of the Worm. Terrence will wait.

But he doesn’t.

“You need to be at Creech in the morning.”

She mutes the TV chained to a wall-mounted steel shelf above a wood-veneer chest of drawers. On the screen, a line of riot police barring a crowd of protesters from entering the Swedish World Trade Center in Stockholm. Ongoing street theater being played out as the WTO meets there at the same time as the annual Bilderberg conference. A confluence of power and money bound to draw singular rage in an era of austerity. She angles the remote toward the TV, presses the channel button, but nothing happens. The cable is pure shit, but the Wi-Fi is surprisingly solid. She’s got her laptop open next to her, a browser running on her phone. She slaps the remote against her bare thigh twice and tries again. The picture blips to a fuzzy image of several large-bottomed Mexican women in short-shorts and cutoff t-shirts dancing around a man with a pencil mustache and a microphone.

“I’m not ready. Two more days. Tell them two more days. How can I tell them what I’m seeing when I don’t even have my eyes open yet?”

“Could you turn on the camera?”

“I’m not dressed.”

She pulls the towel tighter across her flat chest. It is her own towel. The motel’s towels are hopelessly small, worn, and, like the carpet, disconcertingly stained. Her towel is a thirty-six-by-seventy-two-inch rectangle of hyperabsorbent antibacterial material that can be compressed into a pouch the size of an old-fashioned CD jewel box.

“How was the desert?”

Jae picks up the half-liter bottle of Tahitian spring water she bought from the vending machine outside the motel office.
T
he desert was like being in an isolation chamber, Terrence. The desert didn’t force my brain to create connections between Mexican TV production and the efficacy of Wi-Fi in the Mohave. The desert felt like limbo. Same as always. It felt like waiting for the end of the world.

She takes a sip of water.

“The desert was fine.”

“Are you on anything?”

She looks at the brown pharmacy bottles and plastic baggies peeking from her unzipped duffle on the floor.

“Coming down.”

“Are you secured?”

Jae slaps the remote again, presses the button, blips to a scene shot through a night-vision lens. Handheld, documentary or reality TV. Several young people, men, one woman, a law enforcement unit of some kind. Khakis, black shirts, windbreakers and caps with large yellow letters, an acronym: TAPS. An agency she’s never heard of. They give the appearance of being on a night raid in some kind of underground facility, but carry no weapons. They carry cameras, infrared lamps, and several different wands and scopes cabled to various boxes strapped to their persons, everything studded with impressively glowing LEDs.

Jae looks from the TV to the screen of the Toughbook sitting next to her on the narrow bed.

Skype open, showing an active call, no video, connected to
terrenceTT
.

Is she secured?

She looks up at the ceiling. Beyond it and the warming atmosphere are three thousand or so man-made, functioning (to one degree or another) satellites. Those give her little or no pause. It is the additional dozens, perhaps hundreds, of satellites about which she knows nothing that are sometimes the focus of her ever-roving and fretful mind. She considers it unlikely that any of them is singularly dedicated to tracking her movements and monitoring her activities, but unlikely does not mean impossible. Her phone, her vehicle GPS, the Toughbook. All obvious loci for unwanted observation. Hazards of the digital age. Looking into the abyss requires, by necessity, having it also look into you.

Is she secured?

She moves her fingertip over the Toughbook’s trackpad, clicks on a white icon in the shape of a cartoon spider. Eight small windows unfold, each one a square in a grid, live video feeds from the cluster of wall-crawling, eight-legged surveillance bots she released through the bathroom window as soon as she’d come into the room. Little more than camera platforms that can communicate locative data and triangulate with their clustermates, the eight spiders had scrambled away, finding roof edges, corners of walls, points equidistant and as far as possible from each other, plotting overlap between their fields of view. The parking lot, the doors of the other rooms, office, open desert behind the motel, highway, cloudless and star spackled sky above. Occasionally the camera views shift, covering gaps, rotating by minutes. Should a team of unarmed TAPS agents attempt to storm the motel and take obscure measurements, she will see them coming.

She removes her finger from the trackpad.

“There is no security, Terrence.”

“Please don’t tell that to our clients.”

On the TV, the agents of TAPS, reacting as though they have heard a disturbing noise. They begin waving their wands and scopes, taking readings, speaking into the camera that trails them.

“Have you ever worked with TAPS?”

A silence from the computer, longer than the usual Skype delay, and then Terrence again.

“Shoes?”

“T-A-P-S. Investigative something.”

“American?”

“They have a reality show. Like
COPS
.
I think.”

The TAPS task force, hustling down a concrete corridor that reminds Jae of a military bunker. In fact, if asked, she’d give her professional opinion that it is a bunker. Cold war era. European. Eastern.

“Weapons inspectors maybe?”

She hears a background clatter from her computer’s speaker, the usually soft tapping of computer keys amplified by their proximity to the microphone built into Terrence’s own laptop.

“Weapons inspectors with a reality show?”

“Looking for missing Soviet nukes. Ivory-grade plutonium. Did they get all of it from the Kazakhstan reactor? Aktau. I heard they were still trying to make the inventory come out right.”

The clacking stops.

“The Atlantic Paranormal Society.”

Jae is thinking about Soviet bombs, fissionable materials, vast stockpiles scattered throughout the Eastern bloc. Robots she’s designed for rescue have been modified for use in potentially contaminated sites. Die-in-place units, never intended for recovery, that had been dropped through cracks in reinforced concrete caps that were never actually reinforced. The cash margin between a proper waste depot cap and an improper one having been skimmed and split between contractors and party apparatchiks. She’s seen documents, layers of redaction, but between the black lines were bombs enough to blow a hole through the center of the globe, all of them unaccounted for.