Midnight Empire (11 page)

‘Well, don't you have plans?' he asked. ‘Things you want to do?'

She thought about this. ‘Maybe I want to return to Poland, do you mean? Maybe I want to live in Paris or in New York or Istanbul?'

‘Yes. I mean, how long are you here for?'

‘I don't think I have decided,' she said.

They were in a piano bar. The pianist was playing a soft American-sounding song they didn't know.

‘What will make you decide?' he asked.

Ania took a while to respond. ‘I don't know,' she said eventually. ‘When I have enough money, I suppose.'

‘Enough for what?'

‘For the plan I don't yet have, wise guy.'

‘Sorry.'

‘It's alright. It's a good question that you are going to ask. You should ask it.'

He said, ‘Alright. What are you doing with your life?'

‘I am playing cards,' she said. ‘I am a card player.'

‘A professional.'

‘This I don't know about. I would just say that I win.'

‘You are winning at cards.'

‘Yes.'

‘A lot of money?' He knew this was breaking the rules.

She sipped at her drink, thinking. ‘Maybe for other people it would be a lot of money,' she said. ‘But I am playing cards.'

He looked at her.

‘Let me explain,' she said. ‘When I stop playing, which I will one day, then what I have accumulated,
that
will be a lot of money. It will be my money, in a bank. But until I stop playing I am not playing with money. What I mean is that I cannot afford to think that I am. Do you see? If you begin thinking about the value of the money you are betting and what you might do with it, by considering your future for example, then you will be scared. You will be at a disadvantage. The other players, who do not care about the value of money, they will run right over you. They will figure out what you are saying to yourself in your head and they will kill you dead. So the moment you have a plan for the future, that will be the moment the game turns and you begin to lose. In other words, for a card player, what you and I are doing, this is a dangerous conversation to have.'

He understood, or thought he did. The waitress came over and Ania ordered another round. ‘What about you?' she said then. ‘I do not see a professional player, therefore you must have plans?'

‘Well,' he began, but he couldn't immediately think of anything, so he said, ‘I suppose I'm just here for now, like you.' But he wasn't sure whether that was true.

‘Fighting a war,' she said.

‘Well . . .'

‘Tell me why you wanted to do that. Why did you volunteer?'

‘I didn't volunteer.'

‘You did not? Were you conscripted?'

‘No.'

‘Then why are you here?'

‘It is simply that I have a job. I am doing my job.'

‘You are at war because of your job?'

‘Yes.'

She seemed to find this amusing. ‘But that is not romantic,' she said. ‘How am I supposed to believe that you are my hero, if it is your job?'

‘I . . .' he began.

But Ania was still thinking. ‘Will that be your epitaph,' she joked, ‘when you are killed? “Doing his job.”'

This annoyed him. ‘To begin with, I won't be killed,' he said.

‘You are fighting a war, but you won't be killed?'

‘Yes.'

‘That doesn't make sense. If what you are fighting is a war, then you must surely be in danger of dying. Otherwise, what you are fighting is not a war. It is something else.'

‘We drop bombs on people,' he said. ‘They are trying to harm people and we blow them up. I don't know what else you'd call it.'

She thought about this as the song finished. ‘Then you must be wrong,' she said. ‘And somebody out there is hoping to kill you.'

6

T
he city of rooftops and the maroon Toyota Crown. They spotted it parked in the Pakistani dawn, two blocks from the safe house near the police station. The early light gave its hood a serene glaze. This was north of the Old City—an alleyway off a main road.

Raul rang Dupont. The agent's voice was flat calm. It was agreed that Dupont would send someone, one of the paramilitaries, a boy who'd check the bumper for a specific dent—the car's plates were often changed.

From this height you could see the city getting started, the streets beginning to fill, the bazaars setting up. In the control station they sat in silence but you could imagine the becoming rumble, the trade of voices and the traffic and a million domestic sounds, the hammer of small industry. The light grew more golden before it turned white. They climbed and then circled as high as they could, the city below and the mountains in the west.

Raul was at Daniel's shoulder, checking the encryption. Then they were all watching the screens, the Toyota at the apex of their vision, a building stream of people flowing past it on their morning way; you could actually see some of them brushing their teeth.

The car was the car: Dupont rang to say his boy had confirmed it. For a while they looked for the boy in their vision, but even knowing he was there they could not tell who or where he was. Raul plucked one of the images of Abu Yamin from the wall, taken from height, from a Predator, and stuck it above the command console. Then they watched the flow of people, their view of the alley rotating slowly with the circle of the drone.

Dupont rang. What was the plan? Leave the car with the boy and check the other houses?

‘We'll stay with the car,' said Raul.

That was at 8 a.m., drone time, and at midday they sent Daniel for food. He stepped out of the control station into the cool night of the desert and went to the mess. He got four subs: a ham and cheese; a cheese steak; a chicken and mayonnaise; roast turkey. He got four bottles of Zasp and four of Friar's Cola. They packed it all into a paper bag for him, and then he walked back to the station, his feet crunching on the gravel.

They watched the car while they ate, the drone on autopilot but it wasn't a system fully trusted. Ellis didn't leave his seat.

To fill time, Moore told the story of the enormous shadow, a great darkness which had once stretched across the landscape towards his drone. It came from the horizon and at first he had thought it was a fault with the camera. He'd adjusted the drone's attack but there was no technical problem, everything shifted with him—the blackness was a thing of the landscape, real. For a moment, he'd thought to seize the controls and change direction, but the thing, the impossible and mysterious force, was moving too fast, deleting all before it, and so he just gave in, held the drone steady; it was as if he was surfing and a tsunami had suddenly appeared as big as a house, sure death, what could you do but dive under, so he said.

When the blackness hit the drone, everything visual vanished. The instruments showed nothing out of the ordinary but the night vision started to work. He flew like this for seven minutes, afraid to touch the controls. Nothing but darkness until, on the horizon, white light again, sweeping towards him. And he realised before that light met him above the desert that he'd just flown through a solar eclipse. The fact of it was remarkable—the moon and the sun, that abstract solar world, suddenly present and tangible with its impossible mass, speed and gravity; it was sublime wonder and terror, a reminder of the absurdity of man. He felt like some kind of New World explorer; he knew what had happened but that didn't explain it and the natives were going apeshit and maybe he wanted to go apeshit too. But instead he flew on. He completed the mission, and on the debriefing form, under non-critical notes, he wrote,
Solar Eclipse. Drone reaction nil
. And nobody read it. Or if they did, nobody cared.

Daniel's father sent him a book,
Europe's Skies
, the story of the development of armed planes. He sat in the Starbucks at the Fashion Show Mall and read about trench warfare and bomblets, about the war planes of Austro-Hungary, England and France. He read about the genius of the interrupted gear that enabled guns to fire through the arc of the spinning propeller. He read about the Fokker and the Sopwith, the Nieuport and the Bristol Scout; about warring pilots trying to drop objects on each other, bricks and shoe irons, and in one case a feral cat.

He wasn't sure what his father meant by sending it. That times had changed? That Daniel was following in footsteps?

That evening, for some reason the feeling of Hannah hit him hard as he queued for dinner. The feeling of her body on his. And it hurt: the seizing of his chest. It welled up.

He got to the front of the line. The noise was the mess at full clamour. He collected steak and chips and Zasp, and there was not an empty table to sit at in the house.

The following evening they sat drinking coffee and looking at the mountains. Almost white light from the sunset, as if their peaks were stucco. Gray was talking about ways to find north: watch hands, sticks in the ground, the constellation of Orion. Wolfe wasn't correcting him so much as offering variations of method for better accuracy.

Pilot education had just finished. There was the buzz of the drones returning to land.

They were talking about north because someone had gone missing in Virginia, a new recruit at the Farm who'd been dropped alone in the woodlands.

‘East–west line,' Wolfe said. ‘Any grade school student should be able to give you that.'

‘This boy is twenty-two.'

‘Hopeless.'

‘I think this is the generational change. I see it as a question of basic literacy.'

‘Man and the environment.'

‘Sure,' said Gray.

‘Find your direction and walk.'

‘Understand your bearings.'

‘This is the new blood when everything falls away.'

‘You think he's dead?'

Wolfe shrugged. ‘Couldn't be yet. There's nothing to kill you in there.'

‘I guarantee a fourth-floor somebody has identified an occupational health issue. No more NOCs in the forest without emergency beacons.'

‘Defeating the exercise.'

‘Wouldn't happen to you, Daniel. Plenty of spatial know-how, coming from Australia.'

Daniel was watching the sunset's shadow as it rose up the cliff faces, the nearest and bluntest edifices. ‘Why don't we send a drone?' he suggested.

Wolfe snorted and smiled. Gray laughed. Daniel had meant it seriously. He tried his best to look deadpan.

‘Could have been a boar,' said Gray. ‘Might have been a bear.'

‘The boy is armed.'

‘People miss. I've seen someone fail to kill a dinner plate at one yard. This was in Laos, a Hmong guerrilla trying to make a point to our cook.'

‘He might have drowned in the swamp. I remember they made us cross it. Otherwise of the Farm I recall only puke. Run some. Puke some. Puke breakfast, puke puke, puke bile.'

The first drone landed. You expected to hear the tug of the wheels on the tarmac but this time, somehow, there was hardly a sound. The base lights were going up. There was the long echo of a door being slammed in the car park. Scatterings of distant speech.

There was chatter about Protonic. Threads pulled from the furious cacophony of human data and voice that was the life mission of the NSA. Raw mentions of his name.

It was nothing conclusive, Gray said. It was people out there saying the name at a rate higher than the regular background level, the cumulative average radiation for the words. It meant he was being discussed, and by certain relevant people, but there was nothing yet to indicate whether or not he was alive.

Daniel wondered what his true name was, why he'd turned against his peers. A man who was two men. Liar and believer.

Authorship and terror. Raymond J Wilson, a twenty-six-year-old veteran of Iraq, father of one and operator with the 432nd, was shot dead in his driveway. He was holding, at the time, a baseball bat, but the FBI was unable to establish whether he'd intended it as a weapon.

The shots were fired at 7.06 a.m. The morning was one of clear skies and classic Nevada sunlight. Wilson's girlfriend, Alice M Amber, had been on her cell phone in the bedroom. She and her cousin Amy, in Columbia, Missouri, were the only witnesses to the event, having heard the staggered reports, mistaking them for ordinary neighbourhood sounds.

The weapon used was a .303 Lee Enfield, found a few blocks away in a garbage can. The Enfield was a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle, the standard-issue firearm for British military forces until the Cold War. It was also, as Wolfe observed, the weapon of choice for desert mujahideen because of its accuracy over long ranges.

Whoever had shot Wilson, however, had stood at a distance of only twelve yards, and their ejected cartridges had rolled to the gutter.

The first person to see Wilson after the shooting was a blackjack dealer from the Excalibur named Nathan Parker. He had driven by Wilson's limp form without seeing it until it made his rear view, then he reversed and called 911 as he left his seat, seeing the blood. When Alice M Amber arrived at the body she did not scream or shout or even look at Parker. She simply stood, her face blank. Later, she explained that she'd emerged from the house to see who she thought was Wilson, not Parker, standing over a dead man.

At Creech, the fact of the Lee Enfield was met by icy silence. There was also a story connecting Raymond J Wilson to a ring of small-time cocaine distributors known to operate at Nellis Air Force Base. Wilson had purchased his house, it was said, before the property crash, and when his wife left him he'd stubbornly decided to buy her out rather than sell. So he'd had to get into drugs to service his debts.

Daniel heard this story in the mess and relayed it to Gray. ‘What do you think?' he asked.

‘You're hoping I can shed some light,' Gray said. ‘To me it sounds plausible. There are drugs at Nellis. But drugs, mujahi-deen—it could easily be either.'