Skinner (5 page)

Terrence raises his voice, slight distortion from the speaker.

“
Ghosthunters,
Jae.”

She’s opening the spider cluster windows, her perimeter is clear, but this close to Creech, the shockwave from a ten-megaton car bomb device would slap this shithole to splinters with her inside.

“Jae, are you watching TV now?”

Her peyote-fatigued brain is composing scenarios for her now. A Ford F-150, parked in the lot outside the Indian Springs Casino across the road from Creech. A states’ rights fanatic, unknowing puppet of a Somali al-Qaeda franchise, sitting in the driver’s seat, praying to his First Testament Lord, an arming switch compressed, thumb on a detonator.

“It’s a TV show, Jae.
Ghosthunters.
People who call themselves the Atlantic Paranormal Society. They look for ghosts. On TV. There’s an international cast. It appears that they’re broadcasting a special episode. Looking for ghosts in a decommissioned GDR command bunker near Kossa.”

She picks up the remote, slaps it twice, hits the channel button as if pulling the trigger of a gun, killing the TAPS squad and resummoning the Mexican dancing girls, now clad in bikini mariachi outfits.

“Weapons inspector reality show. I should have my head examined.”

Silence.

“Yes, you should.”

She laughs. As the fit subsides, she has to use the end of her antimicrobial towel to wipe a rope of snot from her upper lip.

“Thanks, Terrence, I just blew boogers all over my laptop.”

“Have you even been to the east? Berlin, I mean. Former.”

Jae is wiping the screen of her Toughbook.

“A conference, before I met you. Academia.
Neo-automation and design.
Something. I talked about self-assembling robots. Sounds old-fashioned now.”

“I worked there in the seventies. Speaking of old-fashioned. Cultivated an asset, KGB counterintelligence agent. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else so impossibly self-serving and dirty to his core. An espionage cockroach. I was certain he’d survive World War III. The real surprise was that we never had one. Not as it was imagined, anyway.”

Jae leans back into her pillows, channels flipping. She uses her left hand to surf the browser on her phone.
Mexican TV. TAPS. Kossa. World War III. Antimicrobial. Snot.
Her mind coming clear of the illusory revelations of the peyote and the blankness of the desert, reaching out through the TV and the laptop, signals, Terrence’s voice, hesitant VoIP call-and-response, hunting for a configuration to weave herself into. The information around her, in the air, waves of it penetrating her body, these machines to pluck it from the atmosphere, so clumsy.

“Jae? Are you still there?”

She nods in the empty room.

“Here. Getting back online. Terrible cable here. Forty-nine channels. I can barely see anything with forty-nine channels.”

“Jae, you need to be at Creech in the morning.”

“Too soon.”

“Too late. Very close to being too late.”

Voices in the background of the call, amplified, foreign languages, she recognizes number sequences being repeated.
1099. 6766. 4320.
German, French, English.

“Where are you, Terrence? What airport? Somewhere in Germany.”

“Yes. Cologne. I’m meeting someone here.”

Her hands are off on their own now, receiving signals she’s unaware her brain is sending. Tapping keys, launching searches.
Cologne. Flughafen. Flights. 1099. 6766. 4320.

“Jae. Go to Creech.”

“I’m not ready to look yet. I won’t be able to help them. I’m still in the desert.”

“No, you’re not. And the pictures will be easy anyway. Something is happening. Something dangerous is happening. A disaster.”

Her fingers tapping, channels flipping, scanning.

“What? I don’t see anything. There are no reports. It doesn’t matter. I’m not digging up more dead bodies. They can call Disaster City if they want robots to find dead people. I won’t go. They need me to look at pictures at Creech.”

“The disaster hasn’t
happened,
Jae. It is
happening.
People are going to die. Jae.”

Nothing, Terrence silent, just the flights being called in the background.

“Jae. So many people will die. But not yet. Soon. But not yet. We can. Jae. We can stop it this time. Do you remember?

Her eyes are stinging. She blinks.

“I’m tired.”

“Remember when we met. We talked about your configurations. How they all end the same.”

She remembers. She cannot forget. Her search for the will of the designer. She found it. Every configuration she maps eventually shows her the same land. Land of the Dead. Where they’ll all be.

“It’s just what’s going to happen, Terrence. The world. It’s not meant to be here forever. Stop, please.”

But he won’t.

“I promised you something when we met.”

She touches her cheek, it’s wet.

“You said it all made sense. You said if I looked hard enough it would make sense. You said it doesn’t have to end. The configuration doesn’t have to end with everybody dead. You said if I kept looking I’d be able to see the disasters before they happened. And get there in time. You’re such a liar, Terrence.”

“I didn’t lie. It just took a long time. Go to Creech. I’m sending someone for you.”

“Who?”

“Someone with a job.”

“Who with?”

A pause, and then he rushes the word to her.

“Kestrel.”

“Ah, shit, Terrence. Shit.”

But he just won’t stop.

“What happened before, Jae, it won’t happen with him. It can’t. He’s not like. He’s not like other people. And he’ll give you something at Creech, Jae. A map.”

“To where?”

“To the future, Jae. It’s a map to the place where the future is being made. There are lives to be saved there. You can help. Believe me.”

Her cheeks are wet because she’s crying. She doesn’t wipe them. Her hand is going to the trackpad, clicking the call to an end before Terrence can say anything else. Her mind already caught in the tide. Awash in a dream of the future. A future that doesn’t look like the desert.

The rest of the night she spends upright in bed, TV channels cycling, cable, an increasing number of infomercials, surfing her phone along a wave of links starting with the Wikipedia entry for
Weapons-grade
.

Opening her eyes.

IT WAS HAVEN
who first led Terrence to Skinner, directing his attention to a handful of scholarly articles, and more than one sensationalist account of the story in the pages of national news magazines. Back issues, old news, and forgotten. But Terrence had been unable to keep himself from wondering what had happened to the so-called
Box Boy.
The experiment might never have been completed, but he was fascinated by the idea that a child raised in such circumstances could grow into anything resembling the functioning and socialized human being that Haven claimed to have seen. If he had that capacity in him, what else might he be capable of? The vast territory of human potential, and the talents it harbored on its furthest shores, had forever been one of Terrence’s obsessions.

The obsession predated the awful night when his only child had been stillborn, but Terrence would never have denied that there was a connection between that personal tragedy and his increasing preoccupation with the eccentrically gifted individuals he recruited so avidly.

His initial approach had been quite open; he had introduced himself, not inaccurately, as a CIA recruiter at a jobs fair on the MIT campus where Skinner was preparing to graduate after four years of middling academic success (by MIT standards) in the linguistics department, and tremendous athletic achievements (by MIT standards) rowing heavyweight crew and running cross-country. There had been nothing unusual in the initiation. What linguistics major at MIT did not expect to attract some interest from at least one organ of national intelligence? Indeed, following Skinner’s acquiescence to several followup interviews, events had proceeded with such irritating predictability that Terrence had pigeonholed him.
Analyst
,
Terrence had thought. Without bothering to Myers-Briggs the kid, he could see the results of the personality test: ISTJ. Introverted with sensing, thinking, and judging. Not the unusual talent he’d been looking for, but a potential resource nonetheless. So the recruitment followed its course, Terrence preparing to pass Skinner off to someone, anyone, please, a bit further down the food chain, when they were mugged.

He’d have liked to take responsibility for the mugging, claim that it was a skill assessment that he’d engineered, but it was simply improbable fate manifesting in the shape of a hoodie-wearing roughneck up from Mattapan to do a loop of the darker side streets around Mass. Ave. and Western. Terrence’s own reaction to having someone demand money from him on an empty block of Pearl Street under the looming bulk of the Cambridge Public Library was to reach for his wallet. His hand went into his pocket, his fingers closing on the worn leather of the billfold that he’d acquired at Yale, but before he could begin to pull it out, Skinner had stepped forward and kicked the hoodie in his left shin. The black kid’s foot jumped off the ground, the hands in his pockets started to come out. Skinner pushed him, both hands, a shove with too much weight behind it. Hoodie went down on his back, Skinner stumbling forward, unbalanced. On the ground, winded, acting on instinct, the hoodie kicked Skinner’s legs. The heel of one of his Nikes hammered the inside of Skinner’s right knee, and down he came, on top of the hoodie. There was a flurry of limbs, unpracticed grappling, blows delivered in close quarters, lacking force. Skinner stayed on top, refused to be jarred loose, hugging the robber as much as trying to restrain him. There was very little noise; grunts, two fully clothed bodies on the pavement. Their shapes separated a bit, Skinner lifted his upper body, sat on the other man’s chest, weight forward, knees planted in the inner hollows of elbows, pinning the hoodie’s arms to the ground.

Hoodie talking.

“Uncle, motherfucker. You got me. Be cool. Just let me go. No one hurt. Just let me go.”

Skinner grabbed the edges of the robber’s sweatshirt hood, pulled it closed over the robber’s face, lifted the robber’s head from the ground, and slammed it down against the sidewalk. A slightly muffled scream, pain and outrage.

“Uncle, motherfucker!”

Skinner raised the head and slammed again.

Another scream, a moan, no words.

Skinner raised the head, resettled his weight, and slammed harder.

No scream, no movement.

Skinner lifted the head once more. Waited. Still no movement. He slammed it once more into the pavement and let go of the hood. Rising, favoring the knee where he’d been kicked, he stepped clear of the motionless, unsuccessful thief. His breathing was deep, rapid, but even. The breathing of a powerful endurance athlete following strenuous exercise.

Terrence looked at the man on the ground, trying to see if he was also breathing. He bent toward the man, still thinking of him as a
man
rather than a
body.

“This was arguably self-defense.”

Skinner tilted his head to the side.

“Does that matter?”

Terrence touched the man’s chest with the back of his hand and reclassified him.
Body.
Without raising his face, Terrence straightened, stepped close to Skinner, and pushed him into the shadows gathered inside the entrance to the library’s parking garage.

In the shadows, he lifted his face and looked up at the windows on the building opposite.

“It matters if anyone is watching us.”

Skinner was still looking at the man on the ground.

“No one is watching us, Terrence. I know when I’m being watched.”

Looking at him, Terrence knew it to be so. His first twelve years spent in a box, observed half his life. How could Skinner not know when he was being watched? How could he not be skilled in appearances? How could he not know just what was expected of him and how to behave in order to suit his exterior to that expectation? And with that realization Terrence knew also that Skinner was aware that his past was no secret here, that their meeting was no coincidence. And he became afraid.

He looked at the body.

“You should have given him your money.”

Skinner stopped flexing his hands.

“No. He could have done anything. The safest thing was to make sure he couldn’t hurt us. When he couldn’t move anymore it was safe.”

Terrence looked up from the body.

“Do you want to call the police, tell them what happened?”

Skinner’s eyes moved over the body.

“No.”

He looked at Terrence.

“I don’t want to live in a box again.”

Terrence hooked his elbow.

“We need to talk.”

Later, in a Mass. Ave. bar that Terrence insisted they go into, mixing with the students, a crowd that could easily confuse exact times of arrival and departure, they sat across from one another in a wood-benched booth, table scarred with decades of carved initials, varnished year after year. Turning a double rocks glass of Black Label with his index finger and thumb, Terrence read his protégé’s future in the half-melted ice floating in the whiskey.

“Your life will be different now. No matter what you do. How you live. Where you go. Everything will be different now. You can’t change what you just did, can’t take it back, and that will change you.”

Skinner touched the side of his pint glass of lager.

“We are what we do. If you want to change, you have to work at it. Change what you do. You have to repeat and reinforce. Over and over. Do the same thing again and again. Until it is you.”

He took a sip from his glass.

“Doing something once doesn’t change you. That’s just a start.”

Terrence sat across from him in the bar, dozens of people packed close, jarring their table as they edged by toward the toilets.

“Do you want to change?”

Skinner ran his fingertip over the plus sign carved between two sets of initials on the surface of the table.

“Being a person.”

He looked inside his glass.

“Being a person is hard.”

He looked up.

“Maybe I could be something else. Something I’m good at.”

Terrence drank his whiskey.

Late that night, in the furnished apartment he rented during his marriage’s final deterioration, a long erosion that had begun the night he and Dorothy had watched their mercifully unnamed dead son wrapped in a small sheet and taken away from them, he would get out of bed and run to the bathroom to vomit up the alcohol. Then stay there in the harsh light of the tiny tiled chamber, afraid to return to his bedroom, where, for all he knew, Skinner was standing in plain view, willfully invisible to watching eyes.

Skinner is sitting at the coffee bar in the Terminal One concourse of the Cologne airport. The two Pakistani women behind the counter seem never to stop polishing the surfaces and appliances of the bar, rags whisking away rings of condensation that accumulate at the bases of cold glasses of Coke, or the dark speckles of espresso that splash when cubes of sugar are dropped into tiny white cups. They speak flawless Bavarian-accented German. Educated German. Terrence orders a lemonade and looks for objects that might kill him. There are many glasses at hand. A tower of them on the other side of the counter. The bar itself is round, covered in brushed stainless steel, 360 degrees of blunt object. None of the flatware is at all sharp, but the fat end of a butter knife’s handle can be forced through the jelly of an eye. Terrence stops his catalogue. There is no point. Senseless Death chooses targets haphazardly; Skinner does not.

One of the Pakistani women wipes the bar in front of him and places a napkin and, upon it, a sweating glass. He wraps his hand around the glass, gets up, and walks toward Skinner, half the circumference of the round bar to be traveled. Terrence carries his drink in one hand, fingers of his other hand gliding on the smooth edge of the bar, tracing the half circle.

Am I doing this?

Terrence stops walking, one empty stool between himself and the man he’s come to find. The years have weathered Skinner, but rather than making him more distinctive, they have etched him with a quality of ambiguity. His clothes have style dictated by a men’s magazine rather than any real panache. Every garment will have the label of an upscale franchised brand. A businessman of means, unmarried, mindful of his appearance, an experienced traveler with a sturdy, tightly packed roll-on. A common sight in any international airport and on any flight. Camouflage for the man who exists in transit. He’s drinking coffee, American, some kind of strudel on a small plate at his elbow, laptop, generic black, businessy, a news site open in the browser. Terrence notes how far Skinner’s hand is from the three-tined fork resting half off the strudel plate, and sits on the stool next to him, fingers tight on the cold glass of lemonade.

Skinner drags his finger down the trackpad of his laptop.

“We never had a chance to talk about Montmartre.”

And there it is, cradle of original sin, the Montmartre Incident. They should have died. Someone should have died. Either Skinner or all the rest of them. The fact that only Lentz and the asset died is one of the greatest testaments to the excellence of Terrence’s gift for operational projections. Though no one knows that to be the case, and Montmartre was, ostensibly, his downfall.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Is Montmartre still relevant? Will it have to be dealt with?”

Skinner doesn’t need to ponder this, having come to a decision about his response to Montmartre seven years ago.

“I’m curious about details. Have you seen it, the cemetery?”

Terrence recalls being young, a brief window of his life that closed abruptly, almost immediately, after he was himself recruited. Twenty-one, Paris, the Latin Quarter, a girl, naturally, snapping a lock closed on the Pont des Arts, their names scratched into its surface with his penknife, the key tossed into the Seine. Sex in, honestly, a garret.

“I saw it when I did my student tour.”

“There’s a headstone. ‘Reistroff Guenard Spy.’”

“Really?”

Skinner smiles, lifting the scar on his chin.

“The comma is irresistible. Reistroff Guenard, spy.”

Terrence sips his lemonade, too sweet by more than half.

“Was he?”

“I have no idea. But the sound of it.”

“Eric Ambler.”

For the first time Skinner turns his face from his computer and looks directly at Terrence. A look that asks if Terrence is pulling his leg in some way.

Terrence waits.

Skinner looks back at his screen.

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Pure Ambler. It occurred to me a little after I’d seen the headstone.”

Terrence rotates his drink, fingers smearing droplets of cold sweat on the side of the glass.

“It was a marker, the headstone?”

“Yes.”

Skinner, doing a hushed voice, mysterious.

“Find the headstone.
One h
undred meters down the avenue.”

“As if you were working for Balkans.”

“Or Turks.”

Terrence raises a hand.

“Don’t exaggerate.”

Skinner raises his own hand.

“Never that.”

He lowers the hand.

“The mausoleum.”

Terrence studies his lemonade.

“Mausoleum.”

“There was a mausoleum.”

“It’s a cemetery.”

“The asset was in a mausoleum.”

Terrence plucks a napkin from the tray on the service side of the bar.

“Christ.”

Skinner looks at him again, a direct look, landing, staying on him.

“The name. Ask me.”

Terrence kneads the napkin.

“What was the name on the mausoleum?”

“
Lazarous. Family Lazarous.”

And he looks back at his screen.

“That was over the top, don’t you think?”

Terrence looks up into the web of slender girders and cables that seem too light to support the roof of the terminal.

“I never heard the details.”

“My asset was killed. Yes. That was the salient detail. Yes.”

Terrence pats the surface of the counter with the palm of his hand, shrugs,
assets are what they are
.
There to be killed or kidnapped or stolen or sabotaged or blackmailed or turned or blown up or reverse-engineered or menaced or tortured. Their value wrung from them in whatever way is deemed most expedient to the circumstances.