The Intruders (7 page)

I stood up. I rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles. The house felt large around me. There was a sudden clatter from the floor above, as the fridge dropped a new load of ice into the tray.

I am not an especially imaginative man. The flashes of intuition I’ve experienced in my life usually have a basis in something obvious, even if only in retrospect. But right then I felt untethered, unguarded, as when I’d stood out on the deck a week before. It was after midnight now. I’d last spoken to my wife around eleven the previous evening. A shorthand debrief between two people who’ve loved each other for a while. Your day, my day; errand reminders; kiss kiss, good night. I’d idly pictured her sitting Indian style on a turned-down bed, a pot of coffee by her side or on its way, her expensive and doubtless too-tight business shoes kicked halfway across the floor of her room, in this Hotel Malo.

Except she hadn’t been there.

I put my hand on the mouse to her computer. Hesitated, then found her personal-organizer software and double-clicked it. It felt like an intrusion, but I needed to check. The diary window popped up on the screen. A bar across four days said “Seattle.” The space in between was peppered with meetings, plus a clutch of client breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Except for this evening. Tonight had been clear from six-thirty.

So why no earlier call?

There had been a couple of attempts at contact via the house phone. But she always called the cell. She knew I was supposed to be at home working but also that my desk and I acted like magnets with the same charge, and it was highly possible I would be elsewhere. And she always left a message. Amy had strong views on hotels. Maybe she got to the Malo and didn’t like it, checked herself in somewhere else. Didn’t mention it because it was trivia and didn’t affect our communication. Back-to-back meetings, then had herself booked into this week’s most fashionable Seattle eatery, table for one, briefings and demographics to read while she ate—leave calling Jack until she gets back to the room. Her phone slips out in the cab on the way there. She runs into someone from work, stays for an extra glass of wine. Would be getting back to the hotel round about now, reaching into her bag…and thinking, Shit?

Yeah, maybe.

I looked around her desk again. Other people’s working spaces are like the ruins of lost civilizations. It’s impossible to understand why they’d have that thing there, put the other here. Even with Amy’s, which is blisteringly neat and looks like an office-supplies serving suggestion. The desk looked as it always did, in I’ll-be-back-later mode. Except that her PDA was sitting in its dock. Amy was the only person I knew who actually used an organizer instead of merely owning one. She kept lists and her diary on it, maintained addresses, took notes, referred to it twenty times a day. She always toted it with her on business.

But there it was. I lifted it out, turned it on. A mirror of the diary I’d seen on the main computer. To-do lists. Slogans-in-progress. I put it back. So she elected to take one less piece of equipment on the road this time. Rock and roll. Amy had her systems. In her world there was a place for everything and everything stayed in its place, if it knew what was good for it.

And yet tonight she was not in her allotted space.

So now what? Her phone was taken care of. I’d run down every available route for trying to talk to her and hit dead ends. It all probably meant nothing. My rational mind was braced for an incoming phone call, a tired/apologetic Amy with a complex tale of screwed hotel bookings and phone-loss woe. I could almost hear how shrill the ring would sound and was halfway to deciding to go have a cigarette on the deck while I waited. Either that or just go to bed.

Instead I found myself in the living room, standing in front of the big windows, hands down by my sides. Minutes passed, and I did not move. The house was quiet around me, so silent in the continued absence of a phone call, that after a time the background rustle of moving blood in my ears began to seem very loud, appeared to swell until it sounded like the tires of a car on a wet road, still some distance away, but coming closer.

I could not shake off the ridiculous idea that something had happened to my wife. That she might be in danger. As I stared past my reflection in the plate glass, out toward the dark shapes against the blue-black sky, I began to feel dimly certain that this unknown car was heading inexorably toward me.

That I had always been its target, and now the time had come. That this was the night when the car hit.

chapter
SIX

Oz Turner sat in the seat he’d preselected, wall side of the booth nearest the door. This position was obscured from most of Blizzard Mary’s other patrons by the coatrack. It gave him a good view onto the parking lot, cars and pickups whose sole shared characteristic was that of not looking too new. He’d been to the bar twice the day before, in preparation. Office workers at lunch, young moms sharing salads. Late at night the clientele switched to lone men interspersed with middle-aged couples drinking steadily in silences companionable or otherwise. Meanwhile their vehicles waited outside, like old dogs, pale and ghostly in the dark. Beyond the lot was the little town of Hanley. A few streets away, through the small and prettified knot of the old quarter, was a wide, flat water-course. Either the Mississippi itself or the Black River. Oz wasn’t sure. He didn’t really care.

He was nursing a beer to hold his place. He’d ordered one of the specials, too, but barely touched the gluey Buffalo wings. This was only partly due to nervousness. Over the last year, his habits had changed. He’d once been something of a gourmand, in his own way: a connoisseur of quantity. He made his coffee with three big spoonfuls of Maxwell House. He took his meals supersized. He’d enjoyed the tastes of these things, of course, but also responded to the comfort of sheer bulk. He no longer found solace there. After a time the waitress came and took his plate, and he felt no sense of loss.

He checked his watch again. Well after midnight. The bar was dim but for lamps and neon beer advertisements. The television was on low. There were only ten, fifteen people left. Oz was going to give the guy another quarter hour, then go.

As he was telling himself this, a car pulled into the lot outside.

The man who entered the bar wore old denim and a battered Raiders jacket. He had the air of a person who spent his days on the wide, flat plains, near farm machinery. The Raiders didn’t hail from anywhere near here, of course, but geography has become malleable now. It could also, Oz realized, be intended as a signal. To him. He turned to the window and watched the man’s reflection in the glass.

He went up to the counter, got a beer, exchanged the pleasantries required to pass as no one in particular. Then he came straight over toward the booth. He had evidently used the mirrors behind the bar to scope the room, so he could look like he was coming to meet a friend, not searching for a stranger.

Oz turned from the window as the man slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Mr. Jones?”

The man nodded, looking Oz over. Oz knew what he was seeing. A man who looked ten years older than he should. Gray stubble over the dry jowls of someone who used to carry an extra sixty pounds. A thick coat that looked like it doubled as the bed blanket of a large dog.

“Glad you agreed to meet in person,” the man said. “A little surprised, too.”

“Two guys in a bar,” Oz said, “they’re the only people ever have to know. E-mails, anyone can find out what was said. Even after both of you are dead.”

The man nodded appreciatively. “‘They’ want to find you, they gonna.”

Oz knew this only too well, having been attacked by “them” a year before. He still wasn’t sure who “they” were. He’d managed to fix the damage they’d tried to cause before it became insurmountable, but he still felt he had to leave town. He’d kept moving ever since, leaving behind a job on a small local newspaper and the few people he’d called friends. Joining the undertow. It was better that way.

Jones didn’t know about this, of course. He was referring instead to the fact that every e-mail you send, every message you post, every file you download is logged on a server somewhere. Machines see nothing, understand less, but their memories are perfect. There is no anonymity on the Internet, and sooner or later a lot of solid citizens were going to discover that e-mails to lovers were not private, nor were hours spent bathed in the light of other people’s nakedness. That people were watching you, all the time. That the Web was not some huge sand pit. It was quicksand. It could swallow you up.

“So how come Hanley?” the man asked, looking around. A couple in the next booth were conducting a vague, whispered fight, bitter sentences that bore no relevance to what the other had just said. “I know Wisconsin, some. Never even heard of this town.”

“It’s where I am right now,” Oz said. “That’s all. How did you get my e-mail address?”

“Heard your podcast. Made us want to talk to you. Did a little digging, took a chance. No big deal.”

Oz nodded. Once upon a time, he’d had a little late-night radio show, back east. That stopped when he left town, of course. But in the last couple of months, he’d started recording snippets onto his laptop, uploading them onto the Web, started spreading the word again. There were others like him, doing the same thing. “It concerns me that you were able to find my e-mail address.”

“Should worry you even more if I couldn’t. Otherwise I’d just be an amateur, right?”

“And what did you want to say to me?”

“You first,” Jones said. “What you said in the ’cast was pretty oblique. I threw you a couple bones in my e-mail, hinted what we know. Let’s hear you talk now.”

Oz had thought about ways of communicating the bottom line while remaining circumspect. He took a sip of his beer, then set it back on the table and looked the man in the eye.

“The Neanderthals had flutes,” he said. “Why?”

The man shrugged. “To play tunes.”

“That just rephrases the question. Why did they believe it important to be able to replicate certain sounds, when just getting enough to eat was hard labor?”

“Why indeed.”

“Because sound is important in ways we’ve forgotten. For millions of years, it couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks—how come we need thousands of words?”

“Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.”

“But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.”

“Which was?”

“Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.”

The man had begun to smile faintly.

“Also why, when you look at European Stone Age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. New Grange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself—the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.”

“Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?”

“Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalog of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century, all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two-foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why—if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now center on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?”

“Tell me,” Jones said quietly.

“Because the walls-of-Jericho story is about sound breaking down not literal walls but figurative ones,” Oz said. “The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things, too.”

The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. “I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.”

Oz sat back. “That enough?”

“For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?”

“Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.”

“WeirdCon?”

“Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We e-mailed once in a while, I shared my research on prehistorical parallels with him. Then, nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.”

“Probably he’s fine,” the man said. “People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?”

“Hell no. Always private.”

“You never e-mail anyone else about it yourself?”

“Nope.”

“Never know when ‘they’ might be listening, right?”

This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Among people trying to find the truth, the concept of “them” was complicated. You knew “they” were out there, of course—it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world—but you understood that talking about “them” made you sound like a kook. So you put air quotes around it. Someone said THEM with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however…chances were the guy was okay.

“Isn’t that the truth,” Oz said, playing along. “You just never know. Even if ‘they’ don’t actually exist.”

The man smiled. “I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.”

“Me, too,” Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.

“We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,” Jones said, and left.