Skinner (38 page)

Aasif is pushing himself up from his tiny seat.

“Everything else was money. Terrence said getting money was only hard if you did not want to get caught. And he said that getting caught would be what happened no matter what.”

He smooths the front of his smock.

“He was very good at using people, Terrence. Putting them together in combinations that produced what he wanted. Criminals, spies, politicians, businessmen, revolutionaries.”

He points in the direction of #1 Shed.

“Some of the investors in Atomenergoproekt’s reactor project, they are not legal and aboveboard. You know? The prototype cannot get approved. Even in Russia. So much money being lost every day. A field test is needed. Terrence was vague when speaking to them, I am certain. But he had money from the credit card scams he had set up. And he had sold weapons to insurgents and sold the insurgents to governments. And he had blackmailed United States government officials and sold the blackmail evidence to lobbyists. Oil lobbies. He had millions and millions and millions because he did not care who caught him. As long as he did not get caught until just in time. So he gave money to the Atomenergoproekt investors, men of shady type, oligarchs, cash-loving, and they helped to see that the reactor would be moved to someplace where it could be stolen and taken away for a field test where regulations would not interfere and there would be tremendous publicity for their product.”

He shrugs.

“But if you want to steal a nuclear reactor and its fuel rods you must also create a distraction to cover the noise that will make. The computer worm he bought for West-Tebrum was almost as expensive as the reactor. So much noise and confusion was needed to hide the stolen reactor. To hide that it
had
been stolen. Secret chatter in Russia, coded messages about a missing reactor. Imagine if the world knew it was missing? Everyone would have looked. But because of West-Tebrum, the lookers were too busy to be bothered. When
your
country starts hearings on how such a thing could happen, a nuclear reactor slipping across borders, across a war zone, and no one in your security knew about it, they will see how obvious it was. If they had only looked. But too late now. Too late.”

Jae has pushed herself up on her elbows, the change in her heart rate starting a new throb in her leg. She and Skinner still are not looking at one another. Too much. No time for that now. When will there be time? Never? She swings her legs over the edge of the table and the flash of pain almost blacks her out but she shakes it off and holds up a hand.

“And what’s the plan when everyone finds out the reactor doesn’t work?”

Aasif smiles, nods.

“Yes. Yes, that is good. Terrence said, he said you see everything. Good. Well. When they find out the reactor does not work, they will kill us then.”

He steps to the curtain.

“Come with me, please. I will show you our real secret.”

As they pass through the living quarters, they pause for a moment to watch the TV, where Aasif can be seen standing in front of the reactor and delivering his message. The doctor’s family look from the TV to Aasif and point,
Look, look, you’re on TV!

They’re hanging by a thread, these people, and most of them have no idea.

In #2 Shed, Aasif shows them the secret that makes the big lie possible.

“General Electric makes them, 747 engines. That is what it is, inside. More complicated than that, but at its heart it is a fifty-megawatt generator run off the power from a 747 engine. GE LM6000. Brilliant engineering. Excellent product. Horribly inefficient.”

It’s small, smaller than the cargo container that brought Dharavi its reactor. If they had the proper filters mounted on the air intakes, and scrubbers for the exhaust, it would be at least twice as large, but stripped bare it’s no larger than a motor home, mounted on a firm cement foundation, a cluster of a dozen thick cables running out of one side to a junction box that spews a hundred thinner cables through an opening into a hut next door, where they begin their journey of patching and repatching throughout the slum. The entire unit is dwarfed by the fake cooling towers that stand next to it, exposed to the sky now that the shed’s tin roof has been peeled away to allow steam to escape. The steam itself is in part the product of the LM6000’s exhaust being pumped into the water tank below the sham towers, and in part created by the heating elements also inside the tank.

“Heat is a tremendous difficulty.”

Aasif is pointing up at the steam rising from the towers.

“They will look to see if we’re generating enough heat from the reactor. At Number One Shed we can heat the underside of the tin roof and that will be enough to hide that we are in fact safely at full throw, no reaction under way at all. But cooling towers must be exposed. So they will look here. The LM6000 stays hidden under a section of roof, but its own heat helps with the illusion. And it produces the power they see balanced over the BMC grid. Very good solution. I am proud.”

He waves them to the door and away from the noise of the generator.

“We didn’t have time. The window to receive delivery on the reactor was so small. We could not hide it here, keep it a secret. And our foundations. The LM6000 can stand on a housing foundation, but the Hitachi would rip itself out of the ground. Our cooling tank, also not ready. We were not prepared for the water flow we need to cool the reactor. The towers were not finished. Very little was ready, but the reactor was coming. And the software is very hard to run. We used video capture of screenshots to display while we made the video. And inside Number One Shed, a recording of a generator running, played back over a PA. Very loud.”

As they walk down the lane, Raj and his mother and sister rejoining them, Jae leans on Skinner and on an old rattan cane the doctor gave her.

“What about spectroscopy? What happens when they analyze the chemical contents of the exhaust plume? They will.”

Aasif nods.

“And what if they analyze the sound of the generator in the video recording and realize that it is a loop? And what if our man in the water department cannot hide the fact that we are not diverting enough water to cool a reactor? And what if they find the taps we have on the gas lines to feed the LM6000? These are our vulnerabilities. We have only a little time, however long it is, before our contrivances are discovered. We must bring the reactor online in earnest before then. Or they will come in and they will kill us.”

There is a liveliness in the lane. Shops have opened in the evening air. The helicopters have gone, and, while the soldiers and police are still on 90 Feet Road, no one feels as threatened. Spices are on display, meat is being cooked on small grills, families have come out. From open storefronts and homes on the lane, every TV can be seen showing Aasif in the reactor shed or someone talking about what it means and what must be done. The world talking about Dharavi. They wave at him, point, as if he is a Bollywood star and not the crazy boy who always was changing the wires. Bushels of bright vegetables, incense bundles, open sewage ducts running into the alleys, kids playing, animal heads on display at the butcher. Lit up, despite the current flowing from the LM6000, by the soft glow of oil lamps.

It is a beautiful evening, and Jae leans against Skinner more than she needs to.

Aasif says a few words in Tamil to someone and then leads their small party down one of the alleys toward #1 Shed.

“Weeks. We need at least four weeks before they find out. Six weeks would be better. Two months would be best. The LM6000 has been running for over a month. We’ve been able to power Dharavi that long, fine tuning the wiring, but it was erratic until we balanced the load, hiding it on a factory transformer at the edge of the slum. Now it is perfect.”

He stops walking.

“I have a lot of work to do. So now is the time to talk.”

He looks at his watch.

“How will you get us more time?”

It is a dull shock to perceive this final checkmate of Terrence’s. Pushed all over the board, square to square, one instant a pawn, the next instant queened on the back rank, free to ravage from behind the lines. But suddenly her knight is being taken.

Terrence. You son of a bitch.

She shakes her head.

“No. Terrence was wrong about this part.”

Aasif taps the face of his watch.

“He said someone would come. A list of message boards and mail drops. A protocol for what messages to look for. How to respond. What Raj was doing, my Little Shiva. Terrence said someone would answer and then come. There was more than one point to the West-Tebrum attack. A distraction, we needed that. Obviously. But Terrence said we needed more,
A catalyst,
he said. To begin a reaction that would bring
you
here.”

Jae feels stupid.

“No.”

But Aasif is not looking at her. He is not talking to her.

Aasif is talking to Skinner.

“Terrence said that you could get us more time.”

He puts a hand on his Raj’s shoulder.

“He told me what to do.”

He presents his son.

“Skinner, this is my son, Rajiv. Will you make him your asset?”

THEY GO BACK
to the shopkeepers’ street.

Oil lamps. Darkness coming on. It smells like faraway places. There are red stains everywhere on the ground and the walls, it’s only paan juice, spit up by chewers, but Skinner thinks about Haven’s blood on the wall of the hutment.

Outside their family home, Skinner and Jae stood with Raj and his mother and baby sister. Haven’s body was gone from inside. Skinner’s own clothes, ruined by his brother’s blood. He washed his hands at the doctor’s office, but it is there under his thumbnails, reddish black. At the broken door, he looked at the young mother and her baby. The bullet hole in her sari. She doesn’t know that she shot his brother. There was a man with a gun in her home, and there were children. Some problems are uncomplicated. He wanted to tell her what a marvelous shot it was. She has no idea. Perhaps she’s good with a gun. A natural. The genius father and dead shot mother; what remarkable people they will be, Raj and the baby named Tajma, if they grow up.

The family went inside, work to be done, Jae and Skinner came here.

He misses carrying Jae. But she leans against him as they sit on a low step, just a step, leading to nothing, at the edge of the lane outside of an unopened shop with a front stained blue-green with mold. He looks at her leg, slight bend in the knee, red and swollen and bruised. Skinner looks up. The darkening sky. They are watched. So many pictures being taken right now.

He looks at the red-stained ground.

“By tomorrow night it will be impossible to get out.”

Jae pokes her bandage, hisses with pain, pokes it again.

“Can you get them more time?”

He pulls her finger away before she can hurt herself again.

“If I have an asset, Jae, I have to keep it safe.”

He looks at their hands.

“But I work for you. I can’t end that contract myself. And I can’t protect Raj if I stay here. It will need to be done from outside.”

She nods.

“I’m staying.”

She picks up a small sliver of wood from the step.

“Terrence. He promised me something. A front row seat where the future is being made. Every day will be different. The world will change because of what they do here. If they last past tomorrow. It opens up possibilities for me. I can feel them, inside my head. The possibility of the future. They need so much help. That reactor. I know something about that. And my robots. I can build things that will help them to be safer. I can help. I want to help. I don’t want to look for dead bodies. I don’t want to look at pictures. I want to do this. A world of lives to save.”

She brings the sliver of wood to his thumb and uses it to scrape the dry blood from underneath his nail. Watching the delicate care with which she works, clever robot-building fingers, he wonders how much Terrence intended.

Did he see this, plan for it? Did he really need to hide the secret of what he was doing in a tangled configuration that only Jae could discover? Couldn’t he just have told her,
Go there, see the future, and help.
Would anything less than living inside his bizarre scavenger hunt have brought her to this point? Her identity compromised by the shootout in Cologne, lover to a killer, perched on the verge of the most dangerous place in the world, and compelled to stay there. How far back did it begin? Did he usher Skinner into the world of protection knowing he would use him one day as a guardian to this mad experiment? How many of his choices have been his own since he met Terrence, and how many have been the result of Terrence’s deft manipulation of the conditioning that was already in place when he first spoke to Skinner nearly twenty years ago? And, most of all,
this.
Did he plan
this?
Skinner and Jae, the murderer and the digger for the dead.

When she’s done with both of his hands, cleaning the dry blood, he rises and helps her up. Standing on the step, she can look him in his eyes again, like in the train station at Cologne, but no one is waiting in the darkness with a gun this time.

“I’m canceling our contract. You have a new asset.”

Kissing so immodestly, they draw a great deal of attention. Everything about them an alien curiosity in the glowing light. But these are strange times for everyone; kissing cannot be frowned upon overmuch. Skinner’s eyes are closed. So that, though he feels it when Jae stops kissing him, and hears the tap of her cane until it fades into the sounds of the shopkeepers’ lane, he does not see her walk away. He stands there for some time, eyes closed, letting himself be watched by the curious.

Strange American in a filthy suit, standing in the street with his eyes closed, in the lamp-lit dark.

TWO NIGHTS LATER
in a gated Maryland estate that showcases some of the finest security systems the free market has to offer, Cross is surprised to find an uninvited guest in his bedroom. All the more so because he has been sitting up in bed reading, with the door closed, for nearly fifteen minutes before he sees Skinner. The initial surprise done with, the shocking spike of adrenaline that literally made him bark beginning to fade, he becomes somewhat sensible, and realizes that he is about to die.

Skinner uncrosses his legs.

“It’s a nightmare. Being afraid. Unable to scream.”

Skinner points at Cross’s neck.

“I can see your throat moving. But it’s like someone has frozen the muscles. Glued your lips together.”

Skinner rises from the chair next to Cross’s writing table.

He’s wearing a suit, charcoal, pressed oxford stripe shirt, dove-gray tie, brown belt, old boots. His hands are empty.

“When I was twelve, I became afraid.”

He walks around the bed.

“I was afraid of the whole world. I was afraid of the sun.”

He stands by the side of the bed, looking down at Cross.

“It was a terrible feeling. And it was very difficult to condition myself to feel otherwise.”

He sits on the edge of the bed, picks up Cross’s iPad, looks at the document he’s been reading.

“I see here that there has been some discussion about how best to hit Dharavi.”

He flicks his finger across the screen.

“I imagine commandos. A pinpoint attack on the reactor structure. An infinitely fast team of commandos who are able to kill everyone inside the reactor shed before any of the Naxalites can blow a hole in the side of the containment vessel. All of the commandos trained as nuclear engineers so that they are prepared to deal with a critical reactor if a breach occurs. All achieved while trained guerrilla fighters swarm the building from outside. Is it an op, or a scenario for a Hollywood pitch? Or both at the same time? Is it true that Kestrel has a new content division? Terrence would have been appalled.”

He finds what he wants, stops flicking.

“You have an incoming email. Large. There are several images attached. It will take a few moments.”

He sets the iPad on the nightstand, puts his hand on Cross’s chest, and is silent for several seconds.

He lifts his hand.

“Your heart is very strong. Good.”

A chime from the iPad.

“There it is.”

He hands Cross the iPad, taps the screen for him, flicks to the first of dozens of photographs.

“I found these in Terrence’s files. It is a comprehensive collection of my work. End results of my maxim.”

Cross’s hand moves, a spasmodic gesture, dragging each new image onto the screen, something he cannot seem to stop. Reflected in the lenses of his reading glasses, they look abstract, violently hued, chaotic. Shapes and colors not found in nature; not until nature is cut open and exposed to the light.

Skinner takes the iPad from his hands, sets it aside.

“I would like you to help me with something.”

His hand slips inside his jacket.

“I want to plant an idea.”

It comes out with a #28 blade X-Acto knife.

“I’d like for people to remember who I am. What I do. I’d like a simple and vivid thought to spread through your peers and confidants. Like
contraction
.
Brilliant because it is so simple. Terrence was brilliant. And so are you. Quick to grasp the possibilities. Opportunities.”

He takes Cross’s eyeglasses from his face and rests them on the pillow next to his head.

“I find emotions difficult. Especially the strongest ones. Terror. Rage. I struggle with them.”

He places the tip of the curved blade at the inside corner of Cross’s right eye.

“Love.”

Cross is not blinking.

“I am feeling all of those right now. And it is only with very practiced behaviors that I am controlling them. I will need to be very aware for the next little while so that I don’t lose that control.”

He looks into Cross’s right eye, framed by the curve of razored steel.

“The idea that I want to plant is that if anything happens to my asset, I will appear. And I will do things to you.”

It is a startling thing, to have your eye cut from your face, somewhere through the pain to feel it dangling against your cheek, and still, in the midst of this, to be unable to move or to scream. To be engulfed in a horror so deep and absolute that you would gladly die now for it to end.

With his remaining eye gaping, expecting the blade, Cross watches as Skinner wipes the X-Acto clean on a wad of tissues from the bedside box, before balling them to stanch the flow of blood from the empty eye socket.

“My asset is a child living in the Independent City-State of Dharavi. You must consider it, therefore, in your own best interests to protect the ICSD. However you want to go about that. Slow them down, Cross. Speak against action. Think about the child. So easy for him to get hurt if there’s a raid. So easy for him to become a victim if the Indian government refuses to allow food aid and medical supplies into Dharavi. Do your best to help. And if nothing else works. Think about me.”

He leans close to Cross’s ear.

“It’s a meme. The Skinner Meme. A potent and mutable idea. All you have to do is think it, and your imagination will do the rest.”

He switches off the lamp.

“Goodnight.”

Outside the house, Skinner feels the eyes in the night sky, searching the world, looking for secrets and fears. He turns his face to them then, and smiles, so that anyone peering close will see him and know that monsters still haunt the globe.

Then the screaming starts, and Skinner disappears.