Skinner (7 page)

Cervantes points toward the electric cart he used to ferry her here from his office.

“The one Kestrel is sending for you.”

He walks to the cart and stands next to it, waiting.

“We should shake it. I have to get some details before I kick this upstairs and tell them the Haqqani Network or some Somali pirates may be able to sink the USS
Abraham
fucking
Lincoln
.”

She walks over, sits on the hot vinyl seat, and thinks about Terrence.

The place where the future is made.

Old man. Crazy old man. If he hadn’t walked into her office she’d still be at Berkeley, running her own lab by now, breathing down her grad students’ necks. As comfortably eccentric and doped-up as a campus will allow.
Look at this,
he’d said, handing her a satellite photo,
tell me if you see anything.
She’d seen something, alright, she’d seen a total absence of anything that suggested weapons of mass destruction.
Yes,
as he slipped the photo back into his briefcase,
but most everyone else, talented people, saw something else.
Then he’d offered her a job looking at things, part-time, paying the kind of money that could supplement her grants and actually prototype her robots.

Then came Kestrel. A chance to put her robots in the field. Then came Iraq.

And Haven.

Cervantes drives her across the base to the cluster of intelligence workstations called the Warren, and the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility at its heart. A theoretically unsurveillable chamber that one of Kestrel’s subsidiaries undoubtedly constructed. She thinks about who might be inside the SCIF, who Terrence might send to escort her on the contract he wants her to accept. She thinks about the implications of this escort.

Bodyguard.

She thinks about the implications of a bodyguard.

Threats. Acquisitions.

Terrence in her head.

So many people will die. But not yet. Soon. But not yet. We can. Jae. We can stop it this time.

BEING INSIDE A
SCIF is always, for Skinner, more than slightly disorienting.

That they are generally very small, some no more than a moderate suburban closet, is comforting. Confinement reminds him agreeably of his early childhood. This confounded the therapists and doctors who made case studies of him after he was removed from his parents’ care. The working assumption seemed to have been that his experience should have been traumatizing, so much so that he must be taking refuge behind false memories of a pleasant childhood. What could possibly lie, many of them wondered, on the other side of that wall of false memory? What terrible horrors would require the construction of a virtual fortress of lies told by the self to the self so as to keep them at bay?

Skinner, as an adult, was startled to think how completely those experts failed to put themselves into the minds of the children who were the subjects of their expertise. It was a failure not just of imagination but of basic principles. After all, what child wouldn’t, given the choice, elect to be the sole focus of his or her mother’s and father’s entire attention for every minute of every day?

For good or ill.

Children have little notion of the consequences of the most basic actions until they are taught to consider them. How could one be expected to comprehend the consequences of obsessive scrutiny. Unflagging guidance. Untiring experimentation. How could a child, a creature so unformed that it can be conditioned to interpret a punch in the face as positive attention, be expected to understand the constant observation of his parents as anything but love? And how could that same child feel the removal from such a state as anything but a wrenching amputation of all that was warming and nurturing in the world?

That they had missed the obvious was sometimes amusing to Skinner. His parents would never have missed such a connection. Parsers of details though they were, they would still have taken a moment to survey the forest before plunging into the trees for a closer look. Perhaps the experts missed the obvious because they failed to imagine the opposite case. Never considered the consequences of total parental neglect. The obvious negative to Skinner’s positive was in front of them, but they never looked to see. It seemed too banal, perhaps. Too normal to be worth investigating. Such was the case Skinner’s entire life, it seemed. A boy raised in a Skinner box is so much more exotic than another of the billions raised outside of one.

So, inevitably, the tight quarters of a SCIF evoke a fraction of childhood comfort in him. Home, the close walls said. The perversity of the experience being that these rooms were constructed for the express purpose of barring any and all observation or surveillance. A SCIF was, by definition, the exact opposite of the environment he’d been raised in. The Skinner box his parents had built for him while his mother was still pregnant. The cocoon they had determined to place him in so as to better protect him from the bruising world, and to give them a perfect subject for their own work. Secretly constructed because, though both were muffled in distinct blankets of autism, they knew, even if they could not understand why, that no one would really approve of what they were doing. Indeed, they suspected, there might even be some slight legal consequences to their actions if they were discovered.

They should have had a SCIF, Skinner thinks, one to contain their lives.

Bored with ruminating on the past, he practices being invisible.

He considers the interior of the SCIF. Four by four meters, a small table at the room’s center, four chairs, lighting from a sealed, battery-powered fixture over the table. The furniture is all made of a light plastic, off-white, slightly translucent, offering reassurance that it cannot conceal listening or recording devices.

There is one door. Self-closing, with a single-use internal emergency release that must be entirely replaced if it is ever employed. Ventilation is achieved via a single duct, 50 x 50 centimeters. Somewhere along the length of the duct a section of nonconductive material will have been incorporated. A firebreak to prevent anyone from using the length of the duct as an antenna or to carry the uninterrupted vibrations of conversations taking place inside. A sealed cube, designed to reveal any efforts made to subvert its integrity. He is, to a certain extent, already invisible while he is within the SCIF. But with no one to observe him, can he indeed be invisible at all?

He becomes blank. Expression leaches from his face and body, his stillness a reflection of the emptiness of the room. Invisibility. Privacy. Aloneness. He learned to construct them from within because they were not naturally available in the environment of the box. Later, he used this skill to kill people. And thinking about killing people he remains within himself a fraction of a moment beyond the point when an air force lieutenant colonel and a female civilian enter the SCIF, startling them both with his first words, neither of them having seen him until he speaks.

He looks at the colonel, eyes skimming the man’s name tag.

“Thank you, Colonel Cervantes.”

The officer stops short, seeing Skinner for the first time, standing with the door of the SCIF wide open, an imperative no-no.

The woman is looking past Skinner, as though trying to see the concealed trapdoor out of which he has just popped.

Skinner pulls one of the chairs from the table.

“There’s a clock running.”

Cervantes looks at the woman.

“I don’t have clearance for whatever this is.”

She nods.

“It’s okay.”

He looks again at Skinner, points out the open door.

“I’ll be outside. If you need anything.”

Skinner pulls out a chair for himself.

“Thank you.”

Cervantes steps out of the open door, letting it close on the automatic mechanism, a loud clunk, as if something heavy had been dropped in an adjoining room, indicating that the bolts have shot home, sealing them in.

Skinner looks at the woman. Jae. Terrence said her name is Jae.
Disaster Robot Lady
.
One of Terrence’s people. And like all of Terrence’s oddities, there are stories about her. The Disaster Robot Lady finds things. Bodies in rubble. Survivors in wreckage. Weapons caches in satellite imaging. Patterns in randomness. She’s a finder.

His asset. If he can convince her.

“I need you to trust me.”

At the word
trust
her hands begin moving from pocket to pocket, making an inventory, assuring herself that everything is in its place.

“What does Cross want?”

Skinner pictures his life aloft, the seven years of transience, sealed containers freighting him from airport to airport, hotel to hotel. An affair in Trieste, five days, his longest sustained contact in those years. Shifting his place on the globe. Dubai, yes. Moscow, yes. Also Albuquerque. Hull. Ontario, California, not Canada. Hotel fitness centers, airport business lounges, elevators with mirror-finish doors, backseats of hired cars with bottled water and copies of
USA Today,
the
Herald Tribune
,
the
London Times.
Drinks presented on a tray, a selection of movies on seat-back screens, hot towel on takeoff and arrival. Cookies on pillows. A waitress in the hotel’s lobby bar, she gets off at midnight,
no, that’s not too late to show you some clubs,
Berlin wakes up at midnight.
Her flat in the morning. Photo collage, two towels in the shower, one of them perpetually damp, ashtray full of the butts of cigarettes smoked with her last night, the empty bottles of Alsatian Riesling.

And the temptation of dark alleys, bad neighborhoods, situations that suggest danger. The opportunity to be there, present, when circumstances veer suddenly from the norm, when someone finds himself caught in a tide of abrupt violence, the possibility of stepping into that tide, altering its course, bringing someone to shore safely. The will to ignore those alleys and streets, the telltales of hazard. Knowing that to take action is to leave a signature that can be read. Aware always of faraway people in office cubicles reviewing, studying, analyzing. The possibility that they might cut across a sign of Skinner. And so practicing invisibility on a grand scale, hovering, drifting, waiting for a signal, a tug on the string of his life’s balloon, pulled to earth by Terrence. Offering something, the only thing.

A job.

An asset.

To make safe.

And here she is, high-strung and exhausted, looking for any excuse to say no. He would not be surprised to find that she tastes danger in the air with the tip of her tongue. He takes the USB drive Terrence gave him from the breast pocket of his jacket, presents it between index and middle finger, and sets it on the table.

“There has been an incident of cyber sabotage. Implications of international involvement. The contract is Kestrel. You find the badguys. I go with you.”

She flicks the USB with a fingernail, sets it spinning.

“And you do what?”

“I’ll protect you.”

She’s looking at him, eyes scanning back and forth as if reading or solving. Her eyes stop moving.

“What’s your name?”

“Skinner.”

She gives the USB another flick, another, puts her finger on it to stop the spinning.

“I’ve heard about you.”

“Oh.”

“Are they true, the things I’ve heard?”

“I don’t know. They might be.”

She picks up the USB.

“This?”

He nods.

“The job. Details. And Terrence said there was more in there. For you.”

She holds it on her palm.

“Did he.”

He thinks about Cologne, Terrence touching his hand. Urgency.
For her.

“Yes. It seemed important.”

She is balancing the drive on her hand, weighing it.

“Skinner.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes are moving over him again, the sentience of a hunting thing is behind them, a parasite intelligence living inside her. Palpable, her brilliance.

“People are afraid of you, Skinner.”

He doesn’t know what she’s seeing, finds himself wanting to become invisible before she discovers too much. But doesn’t.

“When I do my job, yes, they are.”

Her hand closes over the USB, her eyes stop looking for him.

“I like that.”

She rises.

“I need things from the place I was staying.”

Back in the sun, Skinner following Jae, walking toward the parking lot, beyond her, the landing strip where the winged shark silhouette of a Predator is taking flight on a training run. Practice over the deserts of home. His asset ahead of him, unsafe, drawing unrest and danger.

Seven years after he left and his heart stopped in his chest, Skinner feels it begin to beat again.

JAE MET HAVEN
in post-invasion Iraq.

She was there as a rescue worker. Running her robots through mountains of man made rubble, searching for collateral survivors. A Kestrel initiative financed by cash gushing from the reconstruction pipeline. One of the hundreds of small operations meant to show the locals that the Americans were really there to help after all. As advertised by red, white, and blue flag stickers plastered over all of her equipment. That was the cover. The op, her first in the field, was concerned with mapping connections between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda in Iraq’s IED supply chain.

Terrence had conceived the original contract and sold it to the CIA. Jae to be set loose in a database of Top Secret files, tracing a configuration that could concretely establish the flow of explosives and weapons from Iran into Iraq. Evidence to be used in backroom negotiations with Shiite insurgents who would rather their native supporters not know how beholden they were to a foreign government. And so it had progressed for six months, fruitlessly. Yet another of Terrence’s ops that seemed born to wither in the year that Cross began to challenge him for control of Kestrel. And, indeed, it was Cross, after he had wrested the company from Terrence’s hands, who proposed that Jae should take the op to Iraq.

To better get a feel for the configuration on the ground,
he suggested.

Eager to complete the work she had begun, to ease the pressure of the disjointed configuration in her head, Jae went to Baghdad. But the op was quickly scuttled when the CIA began feeling heat from the State Department. The newly birthed, US-backed Iraqi government would rather such connections remain suspected but unconfirmed. A reluctance to embarrass their neighbor before they could discover if they might be allies in the brave new post-Hussein world. So the op was shut down, and Jae, at loose ends in Baghdad, the incomplete configuration an unscratchable itch, was free to find some other way to focus her obsessive need to discover order.

No op,
they told her. Go home. Or stay and make use of the cover story. Save people.

Haven had shown up at the site of a car bombing as she was sending one of her early Worm prototypes into a hillside of shattered brick and mortar that had been a mosque a few hours before. The prototype Worm, controlled via an umbilical cord of thickly insulated cable, range severely limited, eternally having to be dragged out by hand, was half-working for a change when she’d felt the presence behind her, looming, looking at the murky fisheye view of small rocks on her control screen.

She was there to save people. When she’d arrived, an hour after the blast, the first thing she’d seen in the blood-slicked square was an emergency worker prying a half-dead child from the arms of a corpse. Squatting just a few yards from where she’d witnessed that tableau, using the edge of her hand to shield the screen from the sun so that she could get something resembling a clear camera image, and then looking up to find someone who was obviously in the country to kill people, had not brought out her charm. Not that Haven gave a fuck. He’d given her some room to work, and, when she thought the Worm had found something, he’d grabbed a shovel and started digging. Other men materialized, all of them wearing beards, Gargoyle sunglasses, uniforms that evoked images of mercenary forces drifting from army to army in a time of rapidly shifting fronts. They started to dig with Haven, following his jargon-laced sotto voce commands as Jae shouted directions, reading the Worm’s camera eye, hunting for a safe route through the remains of the mosque, a path to a possible survivor.

The man was dead. No great shock to Jae. Her rescues consisted largely of nursing balky robots into unreachable crevasses where they could break down, while occasionally stumbling upon a flickering shadow that hinted at life, almost inevitably revealed as another tally in the final body count. Haven and his men had appeared more disappointed than she. More dismayed at the sudden reversal: one moment digging to save a life, the next moment heaving another corpse from the wreckage. If they had killed the man themselves, Jae thought, his death would have made no more impression than the satisfaction of a job well done. But for a few hours of digging, their lives had been linked to his as securely as if they had been neighbors, intimates in celebration and mourning. A connection abruptly severed when the shovels exposed him to the light of the halogen lamps that had been set up as night fell, dead flesh caked in dust, as if they had excavated a statue from an earlier era.

Jae and Haven talked about it only once. Three months later, when the war-zone affair that began after the mosque bombing was being drawn to a close by Jae’s imminent return to the States. By then they had fallen into a pattern of casual intimacy. Unmentionable circumstances would take him to deeper layers of Baghdad than she had yet to penetrate. Circles of confusion and dismay that he would disappear into. Or to places where there was meant to be nothing but sand, coordinates only, where he did officially unacknowledged things involving night-vision goggles and flash suppressors. Days would pass, on one occasion weeks, and then she might return from testing a new tread on the low-profile Crawler that was meant to be unflippable but persisted in flipping at every opportunity, and find him asleep in her apartment within the Kestrel compound inside the Green Zone. His dust-covered boots near the door, sand coating the floor of her shower, face-down on her perpetually unmade bed, naked in the generator-sustained AC. She knew how lightly he must sleep, but he never seemed to wake when she entered, never until she had stripped, taken her own shower, pulled from the freezer one of the nearly impossible to obtain bottles of vodka that Haven always produced on his visits, and come to the bed with two glasses clinking between her fingers. Then he would become very much awake.

On the last night they talked about the first meeting. Both of them half-drunk but not tired, most signs of her months of residence packed into the bags near the door, Haven had told her that trying to save the dead man under the rubble had been the most unambiguously
good
thing that he had done since arriving in country. Since before arriving, for that matter. A feeling that he’d been unwilling to let go. He was telling her, he said, so she’d know that she had made it better for him, the war, more real, less theoretical.
Whatever that means
,
he said.

Her own reality dissolved the next morning after her convoy was attacked on Route Irish, the long, straight highway to the airport, after the Kestrel security contractors in the lead vehicle had been blown from the road by an IED, and the engine of the follow vehicle had been sent back into the passenger compartment by the force of an exploding RPG, after the insurgents had peppered her own vehicle with small-arms fire and closed on them, looping nooses around the necks of the surviving contractors and dragging them to the base of a lamppost, reality lost as she was pulled by her hair from the vehicle.

A chatter of strobed images: the flames dancing atop the undercarriage, now the roof, of what had been the lead SUV; the feet of one of the contractors two meters off the ground, kicking; a blade cutting into her driver’s wrist, sawing, a hand dropping to the pavement; the open door of the insurgents’ minivan, a dark cave, as they prepared to heave her inside; the hole that appeared in the orbit of the left eye of the man carrying her feet; the mute and tongueless mouth that opened in the throat of the man with his fists twisted into her hair; and Haven, all theory removed from from his work, killing people.

Balled on the floor of one of the Humvees in which Haven and his cadre had been trailing them at a distance, Jae saw the configuration that had been camouflaged by vodka and the corona of danger that obscured everything in Iraq: Haven appearing. Haven digging. Haven seeking her out. Haven in and out of her life and her apartment like a tide. Haven watching her. Haven evoking a trust she put in no one. Haven in and out of her life, days to weeks, always returning to her quarters when she was away, as if he knew that she was away. Haven, there within moments when the insurgents tried to kidnap her. As if he was watching her, watching over her, a goat staked out for wolves.

Her last sight of Haven was of the back of his head as he ran hunched, his cheek pressed to the stock of an assault rifle that seemed to protrude from his shoulder like an organic growth, a sensing organ that pulled him toward targets of opportunity. Leading her, gun first, away from the bodies around the minivan and into the Humvee that took her to safety without him. The only words she heard spoken by him came through the Humvee’s radio as possible threats were assessed in the remaining kilometers to the airport. They drove directly onto the tarmac, Haven’s team passing her, hand-to-hand, out of the Humvee, surrounding her in a crouched scuttle of gun-bristling men, surrendering her care only when she was buckled into her seat in a marine-stuffed C-5 Galaxy.

Her op, it emerged, had never been dropped. Rather, it had been repurposed by Haven.

She hadn’t known she was an asset. Had barely known or understood the nature of asset operations. Had never been told that she had a protector secretly watching her in Iraq. Haven. And she had certainly not known that she was the target of an especially active AQI cell. Haven had suggested deactivating Jae’s existing op. Badged
Two Birds One Stone
,
the new op left Jae in the open to dig in the rubble, her robots sporting American flag stickers, as attractive an asset as they could make her. A successful op. Ending with the asset secured from further threat, and the AQI cell destroyed.

Returning to the States, Jae voided her agreement with Kestrel, expressed her wish that Cross should fuck himself and die, and soon found that her previously tamable compulsion to find structure within the seemingly random had become a full-blown mania tinged with paranoia. A form of post-traumatic stress disorder that undermined her ability to read configurations as she began to forever discover hidden plots, ambushes, and trapdoors.

Years lost. Drugs. Ending up at Disaster City.

When she thought of Haven, she tried only to remember that Cross had known nothing about their affair. Whatever else she may have meant to him, Haven had kept the hours in her apartment invisible. The two of them lost in their search for the man under the rubble.

Until she returns to her motel room in the Mohave and finds him, a big man in a suit that he looks unhappy to be wearing, standing at the window, staring out at the desert, throwing just one glance at her as she opens the door. Haven.

Cross rises from the room’s only chair, a sun-faded green plastic castoff from a patio set, one of Jae’s spiders in his hand.

“I know this is awkward, but we really must talk.”

Jae has yet to come fully into the room. She’s thinking about what’s in there that she would miss if she were to turn on her heels in this instant, walk back to the Land Rover, and speed away in a spray of gravel and sand.

Cross turns the spider upside down.

“What I’d like, Jae, is fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes of your time. For which I will double what you are owed for the Creech consultation. That will finance a great deal more running away and hiding.”

He gestures at her open duffel on the floor, the pill bottles and baggies.

“And buy you a great deal more self-medication.”

She doesn’t come into the room, but she doesn’t walk to the car, either.

Cross looks at the open door.

“There is some delicate information involved.”

He directs his eyes at the ceiling, deep focus, beyond the ceiling to the sky.

“We’ve had a good look at the area, doesn’t seem that anyone is on hand to peep on us, but every little bit of discretion helps.”

This isn’t going to end. Whatever it is, having pushed it this far, Cross isn’t going to let it end until he’s had his say.

And also there is this: Haven has not looked her in the eye, and she wants that.

She steps in, closes the door, takes her phone from her pocket, pushes buttons, and looks at Cross.

“Fifteen minutes. When the timer beeps, you fuck off.”

He nods.

“You met Skinner.”

Jae makes a point of not saying anything.

Cross is watching her face; he nods.

“I see he made an impression. Did you get the briefing?”

She nods.

“Are you planning to use me to chum for sharks again?”

Haven dips his head slightly, seems to look at his shoes.

“
Chum.
”

Jae feels an urge to throw something at the back of his head. Something hard. She could go outside and get a rock off the ground and come back in and throw it at Haven’s fucking head. And then leave.

Cross takes a half step, placing himself at the midpoint of an imaginary line running from Jae’s eyes to the back of Haven’s head.

“The job, Jae. Have you reviewed the file?”

She focuses on Cross, the sooner to be done and on the road.

“Espionage. Industrial. Possible foreign involvement. Travel. Danger.”

Cross rubs his forehead with the back of the hand holding the spider.

“Espionage. That doesn’t quite cover it. It’s a cyber attack, Jae. Sabotage. The real thing. A virtually mounted, Internet-based assault on a piece of key infrastructure. The grid. They took a crack at the grid. Tried to start a cascade. We don’t know, we don’t know was it a feint, a test, see if their code will do what it is supposed to, but they did it. And you know how this stuff goes, routed, rerouted, bounced, reflected. We have a trail, we have our guys at the keyboards tracing, but we need, I need, someone there, the physical sites, as we trace where this thing came from. I need someone to get in there and see where they were, where they went. This is it, first shot fired, maybe it was one over the bow, but I want to know everything. Everything. And that includes the weird stuff. Whatever the weird stuff is.”

He hefts the spider.

“And that’s you, Jae.
Disaster Robot Lady
.
Finder of lost things.”