Devil in the Wires (13 page)

 

Chapter 30

Let Me Introduce Myself

C
hicago styles itself the most
American
of cities. The city that works. They've got a big thing about work. “Work hard, play hard, go in next morning,” as someone put it to me. In summer, temperatures can go up to a hundred degrees. In winter: twenty below, when you factor in the wind chill—­which is considerable. This vast and sometimes daunting metropolis also has the distinction of being named after a particularly smelly kind of onion.

The work began next day, and I began to get a sense of what, and who, I would be working with.

There were a dozen of them. Not the full team. It was like the first day in school. I should have had them all lined up in front of me, only I didn't. We squeezed into the cramped control room of the Beach House, a place already dubbed the “Cockpit,” and I worked hard, trying to remember ­people's names, faces, who they were and what they did, and not succeeding very well with any of it.

So I talked about myself, instead.

“Some of you I've met before,” I said. “Some of you are new to me. My name is Copeland. Call me Chris. I'm Field Ops,” I said. That caused a little shuffling of feet, among those I hadn't come across before; some glances, back and forth. I let that die down. I said, “I'm here—­just in case. My experience is with the kind of thing we all hope
doesn't
happen in the Beach House. And in the meantime, there's this.”

And I did my own little reveal: unzipped the bag, took out the flask.

“Everybody, meet Assur. He's very happy to be here with you, and hopes you'll all be happy working with him.”

They crowded around. Farnham Kuehl, the site director, was there, and I noticed that already there was a certain deference to him from the rest of the team. He was a big man, physically imposing, tending to place himself at the front and center of the group. The cuffs of an expensive suit peeped from the sleeves of his lab coat, the latter as pristine white as if it were straight off the shelf. He stepped forward, elbowing his way in front of everyone, took the flask in his big hands, and then, I think to show me who was boss, without so much as asking my OK, powered it up, and read the numbers on the screen.

“Impressive,” he announced.

I stood back, folded my arms. He gave me a look, a long look, and I met it, steadily, my head on one side, weighing him up.

He threw me a bone.

“Well done, Chris,” he said.

I stood there, like a bored teacher with unruly students. I suppose I could have made a fuss—­there were probably a half a dozen regulations he was contravening, but I thought, no, not this time. You get one chance, and this is it.

A short, stocky guy said, “From Iraq, yeah?”

“That's right.”

“Question, then.” I could see his mouth starting to crinkle up. “Does it speak English? 'Cause my Iraqi sucks, man . . .”

He got a laugh for that. It broke the tension. And I got a lead-­in to my own little speech about the gods. Let Shailer boast the benefits. Let Kuehl act like he was plugging in some kind of kitchen appliance. My line was different. I was hellfire and damnation. I was telling them exactly what would happen if they got it wrong, and what I'd seen, out in the field.

And what I'd seen at GH9, in Indiana.

I got some raised brows over that, some muttering among the back rows.

What I'd told them—­edited a bit—­was something like the truth.

Interesting, I thought, that no one would admit to hearing it before.

T
he Beach House changed. It grew busy. A crane was brought in, anchored on immense steel crab legs, and the last equipment lowered through the roof. The glass panels were put in place. The inner rooms, its former kitchens, were crowded with equipment, with Registry technicians running through the systems time and time again. There were ­people being flown in from all over; there was a Lithuanian who had to have his own translator with him for the nontechnical stuff. I could have done with the same kind of assistance. I asked ­people about their lives, their families, trying to play the nice guy. I asked them what TV they watched. I tried to join their sports talk, but even in England I'd hardly known one team from another. Out here, it was impossible.

On the official side, though, I was busy. I had changes made. I had policies reviewed. I had temperatures monitored, and air pressure, and umpteen other things. I had these allocated in the daily duty roster. I was a martinet, a micromanager.

I was the kind of guy I would have hated.

I was a total, absolute pain in the arse.

And I was proud of it.

I walked to work along the beach. The waves threw debris on the shore—­driftwood, ship's rope, sometimes bottles, shoes, once an old clock face that had somehow found its way to land—­and then the sand came up and piled around them, only to be swept away again during the next storm. The smell was fresh and clean and nothing like the sea.

One morning—­it was overcast, the lake itself appearing thick and milky, slow with silt—­I noticed someone on the sand close by the Beach House. He was too far off for me to see his features, but his clothes were dark, and nothing in his manner suggested he was working. He bent and picked some item from the sand. I assumed he was attached to us in some way, to the project, and the fact I didn't recognize him didn't bother me; it was par for the course just then.

But a second later, I was sure that I heard thunder. I looked around. And when I looked back, he was gone.

He'd been standing on a flat expanse of sand, close to the water, with no cover, no intervening objects, and, as I could see it, no time to get out of sight.

This puzzled me so much I actually walked out to the spot where he'd been standing. The gulls screamed overhead. I looked about me, tried to calculate the distances. I searched for anywhere he might have fled, any way he might have seemed to disappear. I searched among the stippling of footprints, but I could make out nothing there even the least unusual.

D
ayling texted.

Chris
he wrote.

Chris

Chris

Chris

Chris

He could go on for hours like that. Hours and hours. From time to time I'd wipe them and from time to time he'd stop. Four, five, six hours. Nothing. Then he'd start again.

Chris

Chris

Chris

Chris

Shailer's secretary phoned me from New York.

“He'd like you to meet him tomorrow for breakfast at his hotel. Is 8:15 acceptable?” she said.

I was going to ask her why he couldn't call himself, rather than relay the message half way across the continent and back, and then it struck me: because if he had, there's a fair chance I'd have told him to fuck off.

 

Chapter 31

The View from a Window

“I
wouldn't say they're friendly, no. Polite, perhaps. Not friendly.”

“But cooperative?”

“Hard to tell. They look it. They act it. But frankly . . .” I was at the window, face against the glass. “And Newark—­Newark was just weird.”

“Weird, Chris?” Seddon's voice was slow and tired. I could almost hear him breathing, there on the far end of the line. For him, it was a very early morning. Or a late, late night.

“That's not a very clear term, Chris.”

“Yeah. Well, that's good, then, because nothing's very clear right now.”

I had a six-­month lease on the twelfth floor of a Hyde Park apartment block. It was a sublet—­tenant studying abroad—­and every room was stuffed with bits of someone else's life. I didn't mind the boxes and the bags of clothes, but there were ugly, “arty” sculptures on the walls—­a sun with rays made out of knives and forks, and little statues on the dresser: trolls built out of household waste. I stood there with the phone on one ear, the other ear pressed to the windowpane. I had to angle myself just right to get a view into the street.

I said, “It's like this. I go down to the Beach House, they tell me, look around, ask questions. And I do. I've been round everybody twice at least,
what do you do, how does this work, what if it goes wrong?
All that stuff. They tell me. Half the time I'm none the wiser. We're not doing a retrieval here. It's new tech, or it's tech I've never seen before. And it looks great. It sounds great. But, but . . .”

That piqued his interest. “But,” he said.

I didn't answer him.

He said, “You think they're lying to you?”

“No, I don't. Or . . . not exactly. It's what Shailer said. If something's going wrong, then maybe they won't even see. But maybe I won't, either.”

“Hm. And Mr. Shailer. Gone now?”

“Tomorrow, back to L.A. Wants to see me first. I know how that'll go.
I'm leaving everything with you, Chris, where I know it'll be safe
. Except he's not. They've got a site director, bloke named Kuehl, Farnham Kuehl. Now he's—­on the one side, he's
very
co-­operative. Big handshake, big, big smile. On the other, makes it very plain who
he
thinks is in charge. I've not quite sussed him yet. Could be cultural differences, but if you asked me now, I'd say the bugger's just a bit too full of himself for my liking. You know?”

“Americans,” said Seddon, “in my personal experience . . .”

So he offered me the bounty of his wisdom, while I let my gaze roam up and down the street. Not many cities have an architecture like Chicago's. Budapest, maybe, or Prague. From up here I could see these great old houses, with their ornate façades and plain brick backs, like sets for some immense theatrical display that never quite took place. A string of little restaurants lit the sidewalks. I could see the beggar on his milk crate where he always sat, and, further down, the woman cadging change outside the dollar store. A bunch of students passed by, heading out to eat. A cop car idled, double-­parked . . .

I let Seddon say his piece. Then I said, “I think they're happy Shailer's going. Remains to be seen how that affects me.”

“All you can do,” he said, “is keep an eye on things.”

“You know I'm not cut out for that.”

But I
was
keeping an eye on things, and presently I saw her. Angel had a dog these days, a lively, low-­slung, powerful-­looking creature, always straining at the leash. I watched her as she stopped to talk with an older woman on the corner. The dog ran about, jumped up at both of them. I saw Angel with her arm raised, trying to make it sit. The woman laughed. The dog would settle for a moment, then, remember that it had an audience, leap to its feet and race around again.

“Think of it,” said Seddon, “as a reconnaissance, prior to retrieval.”

“But it's not.”

“We're not sure what it is just yet, Chris, are we?”

The angles were all wrong up here. I couldn't see her face. I watched her give her friend a rapid, good-­bye hug, the dog already racing on, dragging her after.

“I'll do what I can,” I said.

“Any word on Mr. Shailer's ‘expert,' then?”

Now she was right below me. The dog shot forwards, proceeding by a series of leaps, pulled short each time by the leash. His back legs splayed. He bounced along, spring-­loaded.

“I'll find out what I can,” I said.

“Do, Chris, please. But don't make enemies. I know you have a tendency to be a little . . . oppositional. You know what I mean?”

I pulled a jacket on.

“I'm sure.”

Made for the door.

“Do try to be polite.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “Got to go . . .”

I
caught her just as she was turning round, heading back to her apartment.

“How's it going?”

She was pleased to see me. At least I thought she was, thought it wasn't just her PR grin making her face light up, that it was genuine, actual.

I was full of enthusiasm then.

“Walk down to the lake?” I said.

“This time of night?”

“There's two of us. And no one's going to bother us. Well, not with him here.”

The dog's name was Riff. He was a beautiful steel blue, and muscly, full of strength. I put my hand down with a certain caution, but all he did was lick it, frantically, his tongue as wet as a boxer's sponge.

“Hey. Hey boy.”

I'd never known I was a dog lover, but it seemed I was. I cooed and fussed over him, tickled his ears, scratched his ribs, got his rear end ticking like a pendulum. Angel, wearing jeans and T-­shirt, said, “You wanna take him?” and I nodded, and she handed me the leash, said, “You got him firm, now?” and I said, “Yes,” and then the dog leapt forward, and he nearly pulled my arm out of its socket.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Warned you.”

She was laughing.

“This,” she said, “is a genuine, human-­killing, toilet-­roll-­devouring, purebred authentic guaranteed pit bull. So you watch yourself, OK?”

“Cute dog,” I said.

“He is, he is.” Then she said, “Riff and me've been through some shit together. But that's done now. And we're not taking any more.”

“Shit-­free zone,” I said. I held my free hand up. “Honest.”

“Make sure it is.”

Busy
, I thought.
B-­U-­S-­Y
. I'd had my chance with her two years ago, and I'd blown it. Or walked out on it. One way or another. So this was going nowhere. I didn't blame her either. But if it never got to be much more than it was now, the two of us, walking the dog—­that still felt good. That still felt right.

We took a tunnel under Lake Shore to the promontory. Looking south, small and dull there in the distance, was the Beach House, visible against the lights from traffic rushing by.

“Believe me,” she said, “I'll be glad when this thing's finished and I get my life back. It's taking up just way too much time now.”

“Tough, eh?”

“Some,” she said, then, in a theatrical tone, “
Prayers from the Past—­Fuel for the Future
. Impressive, you think?”

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“Our new PR line.”

“Nice.”

“I thought so.” The waves whispered below us, hissing through the concrete blocks piled at the water's edge. “It's mine,” she said at last. “I made it up. In case they try to tell you differently,”