Area X Three Book Bundle Page 34

  At that time, she would have been a relatively new hire, an apprentice to the staff psychologist. Grace would have joined about five years later. It could not have been easy for either of them to make their way up the hierarchy and hold on to their power. That had taken toughness and perseverance. Perhaps too much. But at least they had both missed the crazier manifestations of the early days, of which the hypnosis was the only surviving remnant. Cryptozoologists, an almost séance, the bringing in of psychics, given the bare facts and asked to produce … what? Information? No information could be extracted from their divinations.

  The others returned from the buffet, Cheney with a pear on a plate and the asked-for water. Control reflected that if something terrible happened later that day and forensics tried to reconstruct events from the contents of their stomachs, Cheney would look like a fussy bird, Whitby like a pig, Hsyu a health nut, and Grace a mere nibbler. She sat back in her seat, glaring at him now, with her two packets of crackers and coffee arranged in front of her as if she planned to use it as evidence against him. He braced himself, trying to clear his head with a sip of water.

  “Status meetings every Thursday or every other Thursday?” he asked, just to test the waters and make conversation. He clamped down on an automatic impulse to use the question to begin a sly exploration of department morale.

  But Grace didn’t want to make conversation.

  “Do you want to hear a story,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She looked as if she had made up her mind about something.

  “Sure,” Control said. “Why not?” While Cheney fidgeted next to him, and Whitby and Hsyu simultaneously seemed to flatten and become smaller, looking away from Grace, as if she’d become a repelling magnet.

  Her stare bore down on him and he lost the urge to gnaw on his pear. “It concerns a domestic terrorism operative.” Here it comes, there it goes.

  “How interesting,” Control said. “I was in domestic terrorism for a while.”

  Continuing on as if Control hadn’t said a word: “The story is about a blown field assignment, this operative’s third out of training. Not his first or his second, but his third, so no real excuses. What was his job? He was to observe and report on separatist militia members on the northwest coast—based in the mountains but coming down into two key port cities to recruit.” Central had believed that the radical cells in this militia had the will and resources to disrupt shipping, blow up a building, many things. “No coherent political views or vision. Just ignorant white men mostly, college age but not in college. A few radicalized women, and then the usual others unaware of what their ignorant men were up to. None of them as stupid as the operative.”

  Control sat very still. He began to feel as if his face were cracking. He was getting warmer and warmer, a tingling flame spreading slowly throughout his body. Was she trying to tear him down, stone by stone? In front of the few people at the Southern Reach with whom he already had some kind of rapport?

  Cheney had gotten in some huffing sounds to express his disapproval of where this might be going. Whitby looked as if a stranger walking toward him from very far away was trying to give him the details of an interesting conversation, but he wasn’t quite close enough to hear about it yet—so sorry, not his fault.

  “Sounds familiar,” Control said, because it did, and he even knew what came next.

  “The operative infiltrates the group, or the edges of the group,” Grace said. “He gets to know some of the friends of the people at the core of it.”

  Hsyu, frowning, focused on something of interest on the carpet as she got up with her tray, managed a cheerful if abrupt goodbye, and left the table.

  “Not fair, Grace, you know that,” Cheney whispered, leaning forward, as if somehow he could direct his words solely to her. “An ambush.” But by Control’s own reckoning, it was fair. Very fair. Given that they hadn’t agreed to ground rules ahead of time.

  “This operative starts following the friends and, eventually, they lead him to a bar. The girlfriend of the second-in-command likes to have a drink at this bar. She is on the list; he has memorized her photograph. But instead of just observing her and reporting back, this clever, clever operative ignores his orders and starts to talk to her, there in the bar—”

  “Do you want me to tell the rest of the story?” Control interrupted. Because he could. He could tell it—wanted to tell it, had a fierce desire to tell it—and felt a perverse gratitude toward Grace, because this was such a human problem, such a banal, human problem compared to all the rest.

  “Grace …” Cheney, imploring.

  But Grace waved them both off, faced Whitby so that Whitby had no choice but to look at her. “Not only does he have a conversation with this woman, Whitby”—Whitby as startled by the complicity of his name as if she had put her arm around him—“but he seduces her, telling himself that he is doing it to help the cause. Because he is an arrogant man. Because he is too far off his leash.” Mother had typified that as hearsay, as she had typified a lot of things, but in this case she had been right.

  “We used to have forks and spoons in the cafeteria,” Whitby said, mournfully. “Now we just have sporks.” He turned to the left, then the right, looking either for alternative cutlery or for a quick way to exit.

  “Next time you tell this story, you should leave out the seduction, which didn’t happen,” Control said, a spiral of ash in his head and a faint ringing in his ears. “You could also add that the operative didn’t have clear orders from his superior.”

  “You heard the man. You heard him.” The Cheney murmur, as subtle as a donkey burp.

  Grace kept speaking directly to Whitby, with Whitby now swiveling toward Cheney, the expression asking Cheney what he should do, and Cheney unable or unwilling to give him guidance. Let it play out to the bitter end. Draw the poison. This was trench warfare. This was always going to continue.

  “So the operative beds the girlfriend”—no triumph in her voice at least—“although he knows it is dangerous, knows that the members of the militia might find out. His supervisor does not know what he is doing. Yet. And then one day—”

  “One day,” Control interrupted, because if she was going to tell this story she should get the rest of it right, godfucking dammit. “One day he goes to the bar—this is only the third time—and gets made by surveillance cameras put in overnight by the boyfriend.” Control hadn’t spoken to her the second time in the bar. That third and final time, yes. How he wished he hadn’t. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to her, or her to him.

  “Correct,” Grace said, a momentary confused expression adding weight to her face. “Correct.”

  It was an old scar by now for Control, even if it seemed like a fresh wound to every scavenger that tried to dip their beak or snout into it, to tear away some spoiled meat. The routine of telling the story transformed Control from a person into an actor dramatizing an ancient event from his own life. Every time he had to reenact it, the monologue became smoother, the details less complex and more easily fitted together, the words like stuffing puzzle pieces into his mouth and spewing them out in the perfect order to form a picture. He disliked the performance more each time. But the only other choice was to be blackmailed by a part of his past now more than seventeen years and five months gone by. Even though it followed him around to each new job because his supervisor at the time had decided Control deserved, forever, more punishment than he’d received at the point of impact.

  In the worst versions, like the one Grace had started to tell, he’d slept with the girlfriend, Rachel McCarthy, and had compromised operations beyond repair. But the truth had been bad enough. He had come out of private college as his mother’s protégé; excellent grades, a kind of unthinking swagger, and completion of training at Central with high marks. He’d had great success in the field the first two times out, tracking good ole boys across flat plains and gentle hills in the middle of the country—pickups and chewing tobacco and lonely little town sq
uares, snacking on fried okra while he watched guys in baseball caps load suspicious boxes into the backs of vans.

  “I made a terrible mistake. I think about it every day. It guides me in my job now. It makes me humble and keeps me focused.” But he didn’t think about it every day. You didn’t think about it every day or it would rise up and consume you. It just remained there, nameless: a sad, dark thing that weighed you down only some of the time. When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.

  “So then,” Control said, Whitby beginning to be crushed by their tandem attention and Cheney gone, having orchestrated a subtle jailbreak right under Control’s nose. “So then, the boyfriend has it on tape that some stranger was talking to his girlfriend, which would probably be enough for a beating. But then he has a comrade follow this stranger to a café about twenty minutes away by car. The operative doesn’t notice—he’s forgotten to take the steps to see if he was being tailed, because he’s so thrilled with himself and so confident in his abilities.” Because he was part of a dynasty. Because he knew so much. “And guess who the operative is talking to? His supervisor. Only, members of this militia had a run-in with the supervisor a few years back, which, it turns out, is why it’s me in the field rather than him in the first place. So now they know the person talking to his girlfriend is comparing notes with a known government agent.”

  Here he deviated from the script long enough to remind Grace of what he had endured just that morning: “It was like I was floating above it all, above everyone, looking down, gliding through the air. Able to do anything I wanted to.” Saw the connection register with her, but not the guilt.

  “Now they know that a member of their militia has had contact with the government—and on top of that, the boyfriend, as noted, is the possessive, controlling, jealous type. And that boyfriend works himself into a rage, watching the operative come back the next day, not doing much more than nodding at McCarthy, but for all he knows they’ve got a secret method of communication. It’s enough that the operative has come back. The boyfriend gets it into his head that his girlfriend might be part of it, that maybe McCarthy is spying on them. So what do you think they do?”

  Whitby took the opportunity to give an answer to a different question: He slid out from behind the table and ran away down the curve of the wall, headed for the science division without even a hurried goodbye.

  Leaving Control with Grace.

  “Are you going to guess?” Control asked Grace, turning the full weight of his anger and self-loathing on the assistant director, not caring that all eyes in the cafeteria were on them.

  To reanimate the emotions of a dead script, he had started thinking of things like topographical anomalies and video of the first expedition and hypnotic conditioning—inverse to the extreme where ritual decreed he hold words in his head like horrible goiter and math homework to stop from coming too soon during sex.

  “Are you going to fucking guess?” he hissed in a kind of mega-whisper, wanting to confess not to anyone in the audience, but to the biologist.

  “They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s right!” Control shouted, knowing that even the people serving the food at the far-distant buffet could hear him, were looking at him. Maybe fifteen people remained there, in the cafeteria, most trying to pretend none of this was happening.

  “They shoot Rachel McCarthy,” Control said. “Although by the time they’re searching for me, I’m already safe at home. After, what? Two or three conversations? A standard surveillance operation from my perspective. I’m being pulled in for a debriefing while other, more seasoned, agents are brought in to follow up on the lead. Except by then the militia has beaten McCarthy half senseless and driven her to the top of an abandoned quarry. And they want her to tell the truth, to just tell the truth about the person in the bar. Which she can’t do, because she’s innocent and didn’t know I was an operative. But that’s the wrong answer—any answer is the wrong answer by then.” Will always be the wrong answer. And around the time that he’s excited he helped crack the case wide open, and a judge is issuing warrants, the boyfriend has shot McCarthy in the head, twice, and let her fall, dead, into the shallow water below. To be found three days later by the local police.

  Anyone else might have been finished, although he’d been too green to know that. He hadn’t known until years later that his mother had rescued him, for better or worse. Called in favors. Pulled strings. Greased palms. All the usual clichés that masked every unique collusion. Because—she told him when she finally confessed, when it no longer mattered one way or the other—she believed in him and knew that he had much more to offer.

  Control had spent a year on suspension, going to therapy that couldn’t repair the breach, endured a retraining program that cast a broad net to catch a tiny mistake that kept escaping anyway over and over in his mind. Then he had been given an administrative desk job, from which he’d worked his way up through the ranks again, to the exalted non-position of “fixer,” with the clear understanding that he’d never be deployed in the field again.

  So that one day he could be called upon to run a peculiar backwater agency. So that what he couldn’t bring himself to confess to any of his girlfriends he could shout out loudly in a cafeteria, in front of a woman who appeared to hate him.

  The little bird he’d seen flying darkly against the high windows of the cafeteria flew there still, but the way it flitted reminded him now more of a bat. The rain clouds gathered yet again.

  Grace still sat in front of him, guarded from on high by cohorts from the past. Control still sat there, too, Grace now going through his lesser sins, one by one, in no particular order, with no one else left to hear. She had read his file and gotten her hands on more besides. As she reeled it off, she told him other things—about his mother, his father, the litany a lurching parade or procession that, curiously, no longer hurt about halfway through. A kind of numb relief, instead, began to flood Control. She was telling him something, all right. She saw him clearly and she saw him well, from his skills right down to his weaknesses, from his short relationships to his nomadic lifestyle to his father’s cancer and ambivalence about his mother. The ease with which he had embraced his mother’s substitution of her job for family, for religion. And all of the rest of it, all of it, her tone of voice managing the neat trick of mixing grudging respect with compassionate exasperation at his refusal to retreat.

  “Have you never made a mistake?” he asked, but she ignored him.

  Instead she gave him the gift of a motive: “This time, your contact tried to cut me off from Central. For good.” The Voice, continuing to help him in the same way as a runaway bull.

  “I didn’t ask for that.” Well, if he had, he didn’t want it anymore.

  “You went into my office again.”

  “I didn’t.” But he couldn’t be sure.

  “I’m trying to keep things the way they are for the director, not for me.”

  “The director’s dead. The director’s not coming back.”

  She looked away from him, out through the windows at the courtyard and the swamp beyond. A fierce look that shut him out.

  Maybe the director was flying free over Area X, or scrabbling with root-broken fingernails into the dirt, the reeds, trying to get away … from something. But she wasn’t here.

  “Think about how much worse it could get, Grace, if they replace me with someone else. Because they’re never going to make you director.” Truth for truth.

  “You know I did you a favor just now,” she said, pivoting away from what he’d said.

  “A favor? Sure you did.”

  But he did know. That which was uncomfortable or unflattering she had now off-loaded pointlessly, ordnance wasted, a gun shot into the air. She had let out the rest of the items in her jewelry box of condem
nation, and by not hoarding told him she would not be using it in the future.

  “You’re a lot like us,” she said. “Someone who has made a lot of mistakes. Someone just trying to do better. To be better.”

  Subtext: You can’t solve what hasn’t been solved in thirty years. I won’t let you get out ahead of the director. And what misdirection in that? What was she pushing him toward or away from?

  Control just nodded, not because he agreed or disagreed but because he was exhausted. Then he excused himself, locked the cafeteria bathroom, and vomited up his breakfast. He wondered if he was coming down with something or if his body was rejecting, as viciously as possible, everything in the Southern Reach.

  018: Recovery

  Cheney came back to prowl around outside the bathroom—concerned, whispering “Do you think you’re all right, man?” as if they’d become best buddies. But eventually Cheney went away, and a little while later Control’s cell phone rang just as he’d propped himself up on the toilet seat. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. The Voice. The bathroom seemed like the perfect place to take this call. Cold porcelain after having slammed the bathroom door shut was a relief. So were the tiny cool blue tiles of the floor. Even the faint whiff of piss. All of it. Any of it.

  Why were there no mirrors in the men’s room?

  “Next time, take my call when I call,” the Voice warned, with the implication that s/he was a busy wo/man, just as Control noticed the flashing light that meant he had a message.

  “I was in a meeting.” I was watching videotape. I was talking to the biologist. I was getting my ass handed to me by the assistant director because of you.