Wormholes (4 page)

“See? See? That’s where I can help you.”

“Yeah, like you’ve got the money?” She glanced at his ratty van, with its crumpled fender and peeling paint.

“No, of course not. But there’s a foundation that supports me. It funds research that’s kind of speculative … you know, at the edge.”

“Like Bigfoot and
UFO
s?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I heard about it and put in an application, and they’re paying for me to do this stuff.”

“What’s the name?”

Gerald took a crumpled card out of his pocket and handed it to her. The card read “Deus Foundation” and had a New York address and phone number.

“Deus, like the Latin for God? They religious?”

“Well, I don’t think so. I think they meant the name to mean, like, the ultimate. The search for the ultimate.”

Dacey knew there were dozens of odd little foundations around, and that they tended to support research that wasn’t yet well-established enough to get money from the big government agencies. She stretched out her legs, wriggled her toes, looked at the card and thought a minute.

“And what’ll you do?”

“I’ll tell them your research fits in with mine. That might help when you put in a grant application. All they can do is say no.”

Dacey gave a what-the-hell shrug and put the card in her jeans pocket. “Well, maybe if this’ll get me any closer to figuring out that damned hole. But I’ve got to think about this. You go away now. Just go get in your little van and go sleep somewhere. Call me tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether I’ve decided to work with you or run you off.”

He backed away, smiling slightly beneath his beard. “Fine. That’s all I ask.” He turned and got into his van, cranked its recalcitrant engine to clattering life and drove away, leaving a slight pall of smoke over the quiet street. She waited until he was gone and retrieved the rock and the video camera from the Range Rover.

“Well?” she heard behind her. It was Nancy, the pistol still in her waistband. “I watched out the window. Was he a mugger or what?”

“He was a ‘what.’ Kind of a nut. Or maybe a genius.”

“Or a nutty genius.”

Dacey nodded, thanked Nancy for the firepower support and carried her valuable evidence into the townhouse.

R
obert Langdon Balch, the second youngest-ever Senior Associate Vice President at the San Francisco investment firm Darien, Bowles and Gladstone Ltd., twiddled his Mont Blanc pen impatiently as he flipped through the corporate report. He glanced up again at the digital clock on his desk — the one he positioned in his line of sight across the walnut desk, so he could surreptitiously watch the time when he had visitors. Indeed, it did show seven o’clock. A seven and two zeroes. He’d been ready since the clock showed six-five-zero.
Really
ready. The corporate stock prospectus bored him, and he flipped the last page over and pitched the thick blue booklet in his to-be-filed box for the secretary. The company was a dog. No glamour. No glitz. It mass-produced some kind of electronic sensors for industrial boilers. Not an exotic biotech firm; not a balls-out aggressive software firm. Not the kind of company he could profitably pitch to his investor clients.

He decided to pass time playing with his computer. He shouldn’t need to keep on working. The clock glowed with seven-zero-five now, past time for everybody to be gone. Time for things to start happening. He pressed a few keys to check his computerized schedule. Yes, indeed, he had scheduled the appointment from seven o’clock to eight. It was a blacked-out listing on the computer network, so the other executives who looked at his schedule couldn’t see the purpose; just that the hour was blocked out. Seven until eight, then he would go home for dinner.

Bored with the computer, he swiveled his big leather chair to look out the large window at San Francisco spread out below in a vibrant clutter. The city’s lights were coming on in the slightly hazy dusk, and the buses and cars were rolling up and down the hills on their way to wherever. He caught sight of a cable car slowly making for Nob Hill. He looked over to the other buildings, to the windows about level with his twenty-third-floor office. They were almost all empty. He reminded himself that he had a good office, third one down from the president’s corner suite. Last year, his office had been fifth from the corner and hadn’t had room for the sofa and easy chair that he’d had the designer select. Before that, he’d worked on a lower floor in one of those cubicles. He congratulated himself again on his progress.

He became bored with the view and picked up the phone and punched in her number. It began to ring. She would tell him if everybody had left. It was probably that damned Huston holding things up. Huston sat in his little office with no room for a sofa until all hours reading all the fine print on the goddamned
IPO
prospectuses to find out whether some pissant little stock might make a little surge when it went public. Huston was a damned sardine fisherman. Looking for lots of sardines to make a damned sandwich.

Finally, she answered in a cool, efficient, but very feminine voice.

“Anybody around?” he asked.

“Well, Carl’s still in his office. He’s about to leave.”

“When he does, you’ll come in?”

“If I have time.”

“It’s on my calendar. Don’t be late.” With an impatient flick of his wrist, he snapped the receiver back onto its cradle and leaned back in his chair to watch more lights come on in the city, peering to his right to see the bobbing gleam of the boats plying the slate gray waters just off Fisherman’s Wharf. His clock’s numerals now glowed with seven-
one-eight
. Eighteen minutes late! He turned on the desk lamp, which cast a nice soft kind of glow over the office, without spoiling the view of the city lights. He watched the view for a moment.

The door opened and the New Accounts Officer came in. She wore a conservative burgundy skirt with a matching jacket over a silk blouse. Her medium blonde hair was done up in a twirly bun with a bow that matched the skirt. She always dressed well. She also wore high heels, which accented the shape of her slim calves. Most women wore more comfortable low heels, which he thought looked dowdy. She approached his desk and the line-of-sight clock read seven-two-zero. Plenty of time.

“You wanted to see me?” She smiled, the smooth skin around her green eyes crinkling. Her straight, white teeth contrasted with the nice red of her carefully applied lipstick.

“Everybody gone?”

“Yes. You wanted me?”

“Yeah. Something’s come up.” He pushed back the chair and stood, adjusting his Countess Mara tie and straightening his vest. Below the vest his shirt tail hung down like stage curtains, and below that extended only his bare white legs decorated with sparse black hairs. His interest in her was becoming rapidly evident, peeking cyclopean and bald from between the shirt-tail curtains like an old nearsighted actor.

He leered, bright-eyed and smooth-jawed and raised his eyebrows. She gasped and brought her manicured hand to her open mouth and backed toward the door, wide-eyed. He came out from behind the desk in his stocking feet and advanced toward her, the bald actor leading the way.

“God, what are you doing?”

“I want you!” He continued his advance.

“Are you nuts?”

“I know you want me.”

“Well, not here!”

“We’ve done it here.”

“Well, … not now. God, there’s people …”

“Fuck ’em. No, actually … fuck you.”

“God, you are terrible!” She laughed, showing the white perfect teeth and slammed the door, leaning back against it, her smile becoming vixenish. As her hands fumbled behind her to lock the door, he had already begun working on her clothes. She immediately returned the favor. In a lustful confusion of unbuttoning, unzipping, unsnapping, disrobing, they quickly reached a deliciously disheveled state of undress that offered adequate access for the evening’s performance.

They writhed together around the room in the soft light from the desk lamp and the vast twinkling city. She pulled him down onto the sofa and they began diligently working toward their mutual delight.

A thundering whoosh erupted into the room, shaking them to their very bones. All went dark and she screamed, but the sound was lost in the gale that followed, as papers vaulted from the desk, fluttering in the air like startled birds and streaming toward them. They were assaulted by flying objects — the desk lamp, the desk clock and even the computer — all part of a vicious, shadowy attack, trailing severed, whipping electrical cords. The tumbling objects didn’t hit them, but passed overhead in the darkness, vanishing with a clattering, ripping sound into some unseen netherworld. Amidst the howling wind that tore at their skin, his massive walnut desk, shifted and tipped, thudding onto its side. It bounced once, then jerked its ponderous way along the carpet toward them, silhouetted in the city glow.

They both howled in terror, as the breath sucked from their lungs, searing pain stabbed behind their eyeballs and their skin seemed insufficient to contain their flesh which throbbed and bloated in an attempt to escape their bodies.

She felt him lighten and lift away from her, and he flailed at her, reaching to grasp arms, hands, fingers, but was too late. A dull sucking thwop and the room was quiet — except for the strange, now-louder roar of the city. The brief lull was broken by the rise of his breathless moaning.

Whimpering, she rolled off the sofa in the darkness, eyes ripe with tears, entire body aching, crawling and feeling her way along the thick carpet around the massive desk to the base of the wall and up to the light switch. She stood and pressed the switch, the sudden glare of utterly white fluorescent lights making her squint. Some of the lights were shattered, dark; others flickered crazily, but others shone balefully down on the ruined office. She brushed the hanging hair from her face and turned to search for him. As her gaze swept the room on its urgent mission, it abruptly stopped, riveted by a sight so utterly bizarre that even his pitiful groaning made her ignore him to stare at his window. A perfectly round hole in the floor-to-ceiling glass let in the sounds of the city, as well as a cold breeze that chilled her skin.

Another groan from him suddenly spurred her search again, as the groan gathered strength and became a howl. With a stunned gasp, she spied him, or certain parts of him, directly across the room from the window. His head shook back and forth and began to spit curses and his arms flailed weakly, then more vigorously as indignation grew within him. His body was stuffed ass-first into a spot roughly chest-high on the wall. Immediately below his head, his legs and feet, one socked and one bare foot, kicked and struggled ridiculously. She approached him awestruck, her fine jaw slack, her eyes wide. She grew more alarmed at the sight of a thin smear of blood on the wall from a scratch on his back.

His indignation and outrage erupted. He spewed a stream of all the fricative-rich curse words at his disposal, spitting them in random order in an unrelenting steady tirade. As his wits caught up with his invective, the epithets crystallized into a series of interrogative conjectures.

“What the fuck is this? Is this a fucking joke? Is this …” he paused to pant. “… Was it Catherine? Did that goddamned bitch set a bomb? Yeah! Or maybe it was the ventilation system! Yeah! Fucking ventilation system got fucked up!”

She approached, waving her hands in delicate ineffectual confusion about how to help him. But as she considered strategies, she riveted her attention on only one of his spat-out theories.

“Your wife? Your wife, Catherine, did this?”

“Pull me out! I’m stuck! My ass! Cops’ll be here! Pull! Now, goddamnit!” He kicked and flailed mightily, eyes afire with a blend of anger and fear.

She looked back toward the door, and down at herself, remembering with a start that she was largely naked. She wavered between helping him and finding her clothes. She found her blouse on the floor and slipped it on. Fortunately, her skirt had been spared the mysterious fate of the desk accessories by being caught in an eddy. It was by the desk, and she hurriedly slipped it on and returned to snatch at his arms and feet, trying her best to obtain a firm hold to haul him out.

A pounding on the door and the alarmed, muffled voice of Carl Huston spurred their efforts. She yanked hard at his foot and he budged slightly, but yelped in protest. She stopped abruptly, wisps of hair hanging in her face, lipstick smeared, eyes wild. She took her lower lip reflectively between her teeth. This moment would be the only chance for her to truly command his attention for some time to come.

“Bob, I want you to know that if your wife did this, we’re through!”

“O
kay, now tell me why the hell we’re here? This is just a damn hole in a damn window. Straighten me out, Ralph.” San Francisco Police crime scene and ballistics expert, Jimmy Cameron, perched on the edge of the overturned desk and looked blearily around the destroyed office, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips and scratching his stubbly beard. The lean black man didn’t like being hauled out of a warm bed in the middle of the night.

Cameron didn’t get an immediate answer. His fellow expert, Ralph Gaston, stood at the window, his brow furrowed, his rimless glasses slipping down his nose, closely examining the large, smooth round hole in the glass. He had a long thin face with a straight aquiline nose and an intense, quiet way about him. Cameron had once told him that when he was studying something like he was now, he looked like one of those hunting dogs pointing a covey of quail — his body tense with concentration, dark eyes riveted on the quarry. Cameron declared that on such occasions he even thought he’d seen Gaston’s small ponytail rise a little bit, like the tail of a pointer.

“Well, Jimmy we’re ballistics experts, right?” Gaston finally said, his gaze still fixed on the glass.

“That’s the sign on my door, yeah.”

“And ballistics experts study things that explode and make a hole?”

“Yeah, when it’s daylight preferably.”

“So, we’ve got some kind of explosion and we’ve got a hole. What more do you want?”

“Just seems to me that there wasn’t any gunfire. That’s just a damned hole that somebody knocked in a building.” He shook his head in final surrender. “Damn, man—” he grumbled.

“Also, the lieutenant said to. Now check the other hole over there.”

Resigned, Cameron hauled himself up and went to the other wall which showed a hole that looked the same size. Gaston knew his partner’s griping was more to poke a little at him. It was their kind of friendly sport. Jimmy Cameron knew his partner hated disorder. He hated anything that didn’t fit with the scheme of things. And these large, smooth holes didn’t fit with the scheme of things.

Gaston watched Cameron examine the hole in the wall with a feigned indifference, his sleepy eyes performing a routine scan. Cameron put his hands on his hips, hmphing.

“Damn, this hole here just sliced right through this plaque thing. Man, sliced it right on through.”

“Yeah, this is strange all right,” said Gaston, joining him to view the hole in the wall, which had neatly severed a corner from a metal-on-wood plaque from the San Francisco chapter of the Society of Investment Professionals honoring Robert Balch. The award was for “
something
of the Year,” the
something
part of the award’s name having been sliced off by the hole. “And another thing,” continued Gaston. “I don’t see any debris.”

Cameron examined the floor under the wall. “Yeah, if this was the entry, shoulda been some kind of stuff on the floor. Or if it came through the window, some glass.”

A faint scraping noise emanated from the hole in the wall. Both men stepped around the large leather couch and peered in. They could see nothing at first. Then a chunk of material was yanked from the hole on the other side, and they saw the jowly face of the police sergeant looking back at them.

“This damned thing goes all the way into this office,” said the cop. “And damned if it don’t keep goin’!”

They both strode past the patrolman assigned to guard the office and found their way through the hallway to the next room, where a photocopier stood beside large metal racks holding sealed reams of copy paper. Sure enough, the hole had come through the wall, and even burrowed cleanly through the paper reams and out the other side. The small room was awash with paper, which also clogged the hole in the opposite wall. Gaston instructed three patrolmen to help them trace the path of the hole through the building, removing debris that had apparently been sucked into the hole.

Soon, they returned to the original office and were peering through the hole in the wall. Now it showed — except for some bits of material the patrolmen couldn’t remove — a distant dark circle that appeared to lead to the outside.

“Jesus,” whispered Cameron excitedly. “All the damn way through the building! Okay, that’s ballistics!”

“Let’s get some angles. Let’s get some sizes. And let’s shoot the scene.” Gaston had backed up to the middle of the room and was staring at one hole, then another, lost in thought.

“Yeah, sure, Ralph. You stand there and think, I’ll go and get the tools. I got to get the tools. The black man got to get the tools, because the white boy, he got to think. The Twinkie can’t get the damn tools.”

Ralph smiled slightly. It was an old joke between them.

“’Yup. That’s about it,” he said and went back to his thinking.

Cameron left the room and in the outer offices opened their cases full of equipment. Actually, he always got the tools, because Ralph never could remember to bring everything. Ralph was always too involved in reconstructing what had happened. But then Ralph always packed the tools when they were done, because the methodical criminalist put everything back right, so Cameron could find it again. They’d been a good team all these years.

The patrolman watched as Cameron opened the cases to reveal the orderly set of tools and camera equipment. He began to select measuring tapes, string, a protractor and three-
D
still and video cameras.

“This is screwy, huh?” asked the large red-haired cop.

“Yeah,” said Cameron as he checked the camera. “Looks like we got an all-nighter here.”

“Never saw anything like this at home.” The patrolman leaned his beefy shoulder against the door frame.

“Where’s home?” Cameron wasn’t really interested, but he sensed an opportunity coming along. He began laying out more tools from another case.

“Just moved from Mississippi,” continued the burly cop. “Never saw this kinda thing. San Francisco. Jesus. Screwy stuff. Screwy people. Like, I never saw so many gays.” Cameron grunted. The cop took Cameron’s response as a sign that the conversation could continue. He leaned over confidentially. “That guy, for instance …” He waved his hand at the direction of Gaston, who was reaching into the hole in the wall. “… I hear he’s gay. That true?”

“Just don’t bend over around him, you’ll be okay.”

The cop chuckled nervously. He wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not. “You guys partners?”

“Yeah. Nine years.”

The cop raised his eyebrows, realizing that he might have made a mistake in raising the question.

“Uh … you … uh … friends?”

“Sure, but not real close in
that
way. I’m married.”

The cop breathed a subtle sigh of relief.

“My wife’s name’s Phil.” Cameron paused in his work and looked at the cop straight-faced, to see the cop’s reaction.

“Oh …” The cop’s ruddy face reddened slightly “… well, that’s fine, too.”

“Look, as soon as we’re finished here, we want to interview the people who were in the building.” Cameron finished gathering his tools and went back into the office. Gaston was withdrawing his arm from the hole.

“I can feel metal back in there,” he said. “It’s sheared clean, too. And there’s traces of blood on the top here. We’ll have to call the blood guys.”

Without a word of discussion, the two hefted the desk onto its bottom and laid out their tools. The best, and also most frustrating, team of investigators in the police department was on the job.

Gaston began to measure the sizes of the holes using a tape measure, while Cameron shot video and still images of the room and closeups of the holes.

“You were talking to the officer?” asked Gaston, running a string between the holes.

“Yeah. He asked if you were gay.”

“And you told him?”

“Sure. Said you were a Twinkie.” Cameron paused in his photography and grinned the broadest grin of the night, showing white teeth amidst the rich caramel face and black whiskers. Gaston knew what the grin meant.

“And I suppose you told him you were married? And then you told him your wife’s name was Phil?”

“Yup. He asked.”

“But you didn’t tell him Phil’s full name is Phyllis, and that she’s a lovely lady, and that you have two great kids.”

“He didn’t ask.”

Gaston couldn’t help smiling himself. Cameron loved his little jokes. “Jimmy, one of these days you’re going to play your head games on the wrong person.”

“Hasn’t happened yet.” Cameron arched his eyebrows, pleased with himself. They bent to their work. Over the next two hours, they tracked the path of the hole wherever it led — through offices, storage rooms, elevator shafts and stairwells, finally reaching the other side of the building. They ran string, took angles, measured diameters, took video and photos and chemical samples, and sawed off samples of wallboard and metal at the holes’ edge.

Finally, they’d reached the far end of the building, peering out the last hole that penetrated a steel girder and the modern angular skyscraper’s granite stone facing. Their view was of an early morning San Francisco Bay and its famous bridge. As they breathed in the cool air and watched the dawn begin to break, they decided it was time to talk to the only two people who had witnessed the event.

Soon, Bob Balch and Anna Mercer were sitting on the same office couch that had supported their lovemaking the night before. However, this time, they sat as far apart as possible. Balch wore a white shirt with a suit coat and pants and black shoes, his ankles revealing only one sock for his two feet. Mercer wore a maroon skirt and an overcoat she’d found in one of the offices. She clutched it tight around her.

The rising noise of morning traffic spilled through the hole, but Balch and Mercer avoided looking at it, as if it were evidence against them of some crime.

The large cop stood uncomfortably at the door. He knew Gaston and Cameron were supposed to wait for the lieutenant. But hell, he was just a beat cop. It wasn’t his business.

“We told our story to the first cops already,” said Balch, waving his manicured hand at Gaston. “There was just this big damn explosion. That’s all I know.”

“And what happened to your clothes?” asked Gaston.

Anna Mercer shifted uncomfortably, held her knees tightly together and looked nervously at Balch. But she said nothing.

“Well, like we told the first cops, they got messed up, so we took them off,” said Balch.

“How about your pants?” asked Cameron.

“They didn’t get messed up.”

“So, you had them on the whole time?”

“Yeah … sure.”

Cameron reached down behind the couch and held up a pair of men’s black bikini briefs. “Real amazing, I’d say. The explosion must’ve blown off your cute little shorts without even taking your pants. Just real amazin’.”

Balch tried to stammer out an answer and Anna Mercer blushed and clutched the coat tighter around her neck with both hands.

“Look,” she said. “I’ll admit. We weren’t exactly … well … engaged in a business meeting. He thinks maybe his—”

“Shut up, Anna,” spat the man. “We don’t know anything about this thing.”

“
You
shut up, pal,” said Cameron, jutting his face forward for emphasis. He nodded at Mercer to continue.

“Like I told you earlier. He thinks his wife did it.”

“I don’t have to take this shit!” Balch leaned forward to go, grimacing as he pulled himself off the couch. Gaston picked up on the cue.

“Are you hurt?”

Balch shook his head emphatically, but Gaston’s antenna had gotten the signal. He asked Balch to take off his suit jacket, and after a moment of indecision, Balch did so, revealing a crease of dried blood staining the white shirt across his back.

“Look, I just tripped,” said Balch.

“My butt,” offered Cameron. “You’re not cooperating with us. We’re taking you downtown.”

“Okay, don’t do that. I just figured if I was taken to the hospital, my wife would find out.”

Gaston and Cameron zeroed in on Balch, and for the next hour learned the real story of what had happened, including being sucked into the hole. Mercer mimed how she had yanked at Balch until he had popped out. Taking careful notes, Gaston managed to fill in other important details of the whooshing explosion and the decompression they had experienced.

There was a noise at the door, and they all looked up to see a skinny, slightly stooped man in his late fifties with short, thinning grey hair. Lieutenant Buddy Barnes’ stained suit looked as old as he did, but what distinguished Barnes this day was an angry scowl that incorporated every wrinkle in his small face. Standing beside him, the burly cop showed a mixture of tension at the lieutenant’s appearance and relief that he would not be the object of wrath.

Barnes said nothing, but flipped his head, indicating that the two criminalists were to come outside the room. Without waiting, he stalked away down the hall to an empty conference room. Gaston and Cameron followed him in and he whirled around, his jaw clenched.

“What the fuck were you two clowns doing?” he shouted, advancing to within inches of their faces. “You’ve done the same thing I fuckin’ told you not to do before! You’re the goddamned lab boys! I’m the goddamned officer in charge! I’ll interview the goddamned witnesses! You got that?” He looked back and forth from face to face. Gaston looked back at him calmly, and Cameron seemed fully ready to enjoy what he knew would happen next. Gaston spoke first.