Bert was a little disappointed when it turned out Lacey had come over with an agenda besides seeing him.
“Come on, Bert, I want to show you something,” she said, standing in his front door. “You’ll have to drive.”
It was a clear but mildly cold and windy day. Small clouds scudded with almost desperate haste; dead leaves spun across the windshield.
He followed her directions, drove to a street he had passed many times, off Quiebra Valley Road: 1970s tract homes overgrown with trees, altered with renovation, most with a boat on a trailer or an RV.
“There, pull up over there,” Lacey said. He pulled up and she pointed. “See that? Anything strange about him?”
“It’s kind of late in the day for a postman—but some routes are like that,” Bert answered. “He has a beard and he’s wearing shorts even though it’s December—but really he’s an ordinary postman, for the Bay Area. What about him?”
“He has two bags. One is his regular post office bag, and one is a canvas bag on his other shoulder. He’s taking mail from one bag and something else from the other bag and putting them in the mailboxes. The something else is a four-by-seven padded brown envelope, each with a lump in it. One for each house, all the envelopes identical. There—a man is coming out, ignoring his own mail, and taking the little padded envelope.”
Bert tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Well, so? It’s some promotional thing, and he had so many to deliver he organized them into a separate bag. And people are curious about what it is, a free sample or something.”
“I’ve seen several people ignore their mail and go for the little bag. And I waited. And they never came back out to look at the other stuff.”
“Huh. All I got at my place was a circular for a pizza parlor in El Sobrante.”
She watched the postman, as he went from one house to the next. “I’ve been driving around, checking this out for two days. It’s certain neighborhoods more than others. Especially in the north end of town. But it’s spreading from one neighborhood to another.”
Bert felt uncomfortably warm; it was blustery outside, but the car windows were shut and the sun was low to the horizon, glaring through the windshield. He rolled a window down and said, “Now you make me want to see one of these packets.”
She cleared her throat. “Well, it’s funny you should say that. I stole six of them from houses where the people weren’t home.”
He looked at her and had to laugh. “You stole the U.S. mail? Can you say ‘federal offense,’ Lacey?”
She was digging in a big handbag. “Yes, well, I don’t think it
is
the U.S. mail, Bert. Here.”
She handed him three identical padded brown envelopes. Each envelope had a metered postmark. There was no return address, though the law required one now, and the packages were addressed to 333, 444, 555, and so on, all on Candle Street.
“There is no Candle Street,” Lacey said. “I’ve checked. And those envelopes came from adjacent houses—and the numbers didn’t match the houses. And look at the addressee names. ‘Gable, Cable, Able, Sable’ and so on. And those street numbers—”
“It’s just . . . nonsense. Like a prop.”
“Exactly. Like camouflage. And not very good camouflage. But then it didn’t have to be.”
He tore open one of the envelopes. Inside was a little mechanism about as big as a walnut: a computer chip affixed to a hemispherical, silver device he didn’t recognize. He tore open another envelope. The same device. No note, no letter.
“And what do you think this thing is?” he asked.
“I have no damn clue, Bert. But look close at it. No manufacturer’s hallmark, no numbers on it, and it looks sort of handmade, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of. Jesus! You don’t think it could be a small bomb?”
He was a heartbeat from throwing it out of the car window, when she said, “I took one out to the beach and tried to get it to explode. I tossed rocks on them, and I tossed a couple in a fire. Nothing.”
“What? Lacey! Holy shit, you might’ve blown your head off!”
“Well, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a bomb. And I stayed back as much as possible.”
“Look, let’s do the simple thing: Let’s go ask the postal inspector.”
She sighed. “You know, I started to do that. I went to the post office. I asked to see the postal inspector. They gave me a strange look. They sent me to the inspector’s office. The inspector was a perfectly ordinary man, behaving in a perfectly ordinary way.” She looked at Bert very seriously. “And looking at him, I felt a terror . . . like I’ve never felt before. It was like something inside me was warning me,
Don’t say anything to him about this.
So, I didn’t. I said I’d made a mistake and I left.”
She looked at a leaf blowing across the hood. “You think I’m . . .”
He looked at the envelope. He looked at the postman. He looked at the little mechanism in his palm. “No. I don’t think you are . . . imagining things. I may ask the inspector myself, though.”
“You know what,” she said suddenly. “There’s a whole syndrome of unusual numbers of people in this town asking for psychiatric help—thinking they’re imagining things. Just over the last week or two. I met a doctor at the library. I asked him about some of the things that Adair told me she saw.”
“Wait, a doctor in the library? How’d you know he was a doctor?”
She was a little embarrassed. “Well, he was sort of hitting on me, and it came out in the conversation.”
“I thought so. And you had a nice long conversation with him?” He was teasing her—mostly.
She looked at him with feigned innocence. “You don’t want me to have long conversations with guys who are hitting on me? Why not, Bert?”
“Oh, go on with your story.”
“Okay. He said doctors all over town are hearing from people who think they’re suffering from some kind of paranoia. I said I’d go to the hospital and ask—and he suggested I not do that. He wouldn’t say why. He said he himself was beginning to mistrust people at the hospital. And then he got real embarrassed, and he said, ‘Listen to me—I sound paranoid myself.’ ”
Bert watched the postman, coming up the street. Coming nearer. Another house. Then nearer yet. “I should just . . . go over and ask him. He must know. I should just . . .”
“So, why don’t you?”
He looked at the envelope. “The fake addresses. Other things— tell you the truth, I . . . would rather the guy not know I’m curious.”
She nodded. “I’m scared to ask him, too.”
He started the car. “Come on, let’s see if we can find out what these devices are. Probably some banal explanation.”
“Who are you going to ask?”
He turned onto Quiebra Valley Road. “Morgenthal, over at the high school.”
“Hey, there’s Adair! And her friend!” She pointed and he saw they were passing her niece and a lean, stooped, spiky-haired boy he didn’t recognize. Both wore oversize hooded sweatshirts and sloppy fatigue pants. “Pull over, Bert!”
He pulled over and she rolled her window down.
“Aunt Lacey!” Adair seemed genuinely glad to see Lacey.
“You guys need a ride?”
“Sure! Oh, this is Waylon. That’s Bert and my aunt Lacey.”
The teenagers piled into the car, Adair effervescing a bit about how she’d been wanting to talk to Lacey, Waylon making a grunting noise that might’ve been “Hi.”
“Before we set off,” Lacey said, “Waylon, Adair said you know a lot about electronics?”
“Some,” he allowed grudgingly. “My dad works in it and I picked some stuff up, sort of.”
Lacey handed him one of the little devices they’d found in the envelopes. “Know what that is? It’s a little local mystery—to me anyway. Hundreds of them are being delivered to houses around here.”
He balanced the little hemisphere in his hand, turned it over. “Weird. No . . . not exactly. I mean, this little round part here—you can see the wire going in this hole here—it looks like a transmitter. The whole thing looks like it’s supposed to be on something bigger, maybe.”
“They came in these envelopes.” Lacey showed him one of the envelopes. “They look sort of fake.”
He looked at them and said seriously, “Could be a mind-control device.”
Adair rolled her eyes. “God, Waylon, come on. Not everything is a conspiracy.”
“How come they’re being passed around in this bogus envelope by the hundreds, then?”
Adair took the thing in her hand, and her expression changed as she looked at it. “Acually, I’ve seen one of these before. I think . . . my dad had one. In the garage. He was connecting it to something else.”
Lacey raised her eyebrows. “Well, then, let’s just go ask him.”
“No!”
They all jumped a little in their seats, surprised by Adair’s vehemence.
She went on, looking out the window, “I can’t talk to them. I’m scared to.”
Lacey nodded as if she understood.
Waylon spoke up suddenly. “Something weird is getting broadcast around here. You want to hear it? My mom’s not home, she’s . . . out today. The house is, like, sort of fu—sort of a mess. But if you don’t mind . . .”
Bert and Lacey and Adair were standing behind Waylon, in his moderately malodorous room—he’d hastily cleared a path through the dirty clothes on the floor—and looking over his shoulder as he worked what he called the classified frequencies scanner. It looked to Bert like a sort of ham radio that Waylon had wired into his computer’s hard drive. Waylon tapped the computer’s keyboard to search for “anomalous frequency transmissions.” They passed through what was clearly some kind of jargon-heavy military band, through a lot of crackle and dimly heard nattering, and then to a bandwidth that seemed to leap out as if it came from right next door.
“This is totally not a legal band, here,” Waylon said. “And this is the one I’ve been trying to figure out. Near as I can make out, it’s from here in town.”
The voices coming from the speakers overlapped in a cacophony of cryptic relayings of numbers and apparently encoded phrases. “One-oh-one-oh-one-one-oh-oh-one. Protocol 7655, an outer representative. Emergency conversion at 76 Meriwether Street. Hilltop Mall, basically ours. A new shipment prepared, seek Cluster approval, All of Us 6777777 priority . . . reset H. Robins . . .”
“What the hell,” Bert breathed.
“You see?” Waylon said.
“Who do we talk to about this?” Bert said, turning to Lacey.
“It’s all so . . . ambiguous,” she said. “I’m going to hold off a few days and just gather information. Carefully.”
Adair nodded. “I don’t know how to explain how I know—but it has to be careful.”
“You and Waylon, can you help me with this?”
Adair grinned. “Totally!”
Waylon scowled. “I’ve got my own plans to expose this stuff.”
Lacey smiled at him. “Think I’m going to scoop you? Tell you what, we’ll share a byline. But if there’s anything going on that’s as secret as this seems to be, then it means, maybe, that someone’s being hurt, or endangered—otherwise why hide it? So we have a moral imperative, Waylon, if you know what I mean. Only, let’s wait till we have something concrete.”
Waylon turned to listen to the radio. “Listen to that shit, dude. Listen to that. And tell me I’m just paranoid.”
December 8, evening
Stanner waited for his daughter on Pier 39, in San Francisco, “at the seals.” Just about dinnertime. So far, it was dinnertime for the seals and not for him.
A chill wind off the bay made him zip up his windbreaker. He leaned against the rail, trying to find a spot without gull droppings. Behind him were the shops, the noise of the tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. In front of him, the hissing sea, sporting some white-caps now.
Shannon had wanted to see the seals. She was into nature. She had Sierra Club calendars at her desk at work, he’d noticed, when he’d gone to visit her there, in Chicago. Were these seals or sea lions he was looking at? He thought, looking at them squirm and bark and loll, that these were sea lions. He’d heard the animals had made these rocks home over the last few years, taking over a little corner of an inlet off San Francisco Bay, right near the pier.
The beeper on his hip vibrated, and he looked at the number. Bentwaters’s SRI office. Stanner had scrupulously avoided getting back to them. But maybe he’d better talk to Bentwaters.
He looked around for Shannon, didn’t see her. So he took out his cell phone and called.
“Yeah,” Stanner said, when Bentwaters answered. “What’s up?”
“Stanner? You haven’t been returning our calls.”
Stanner hesitated. Should he speak freely? It might be used against him. He decided to take the plunge. “Last message I got said I should blow off the investigation. I’m not going to do that yet— and I don’t want to be in the position of having to refuse to take orders. You don’t outrank me—so I can talk to you.”
“If you’re smart, you won’t go back to that town. The Facility doesn’t know what to do about it, Stanner. There’s a kind of paralysis of disagreement.”
“So they’re convinced it’s spreading?”
“Yeah. They’ve sent a few people through. They’ve found a frequency being used for a certain level of communication between the cluster and the breakouts.”
“How far’s it gone? I can’t tell, short of holding some guy down and cutting him open.”
“You were right, they can’t do everyone just overnight. They have to create the microinterfaces, and that takes time. So they’re doing some neighborhoods faster than others. Apparently they’re experimenting with animals, and combinations, and they’re using them to control the perimeter. Pretty soon they’ll seal it off completely. So what can you hope to accomplish? You may as well come in from the goddamned cold.”
“I’ll tell you what, I think that town can be saved. Listen, you remember the blanking system we were working on?”
“That takes access to a huge in-place transmission system, or a hydrogen bomb or something, to generate a pulse big enough—”
“No, listen, dammit. There might be an infrastructure, an in-place system we can access, if you can get me a design for an EMP booster that could be hooked into a microwave transmitter. It has to be based on the design the Facility has—the one we modeled.”