Area X Three Book Bundle Page 38

  Control smiled and waved. In some other universe, Control fled, abandoning his mission, but not in this one.

  The girl didn’t wave back, but she didn’t run away, either.

  He took that as a sign and went inside.

  No one had been here in months, but there was a kind of swirling movement to the air that he wanted to attribute to a fan he couldn’t see, or an air-conditioning unit that had just cut out. Except that Grace had had the electricity turned off until the director returned, “to save money for her.” The rain was coming down hard enough now that it added to the gloom, so he turned on his flashlight. No one would notice—he was too far away from the windows, and the glass doors had a long dark curtain across them. Most people would be at work anyway.

  The director’s neighbors would have known her as a psychologist in private practice, if they had known her at all. Was the photo in Grace’s office an anomaly, or did the director often eat barbecue with a beer in her hand? Had Lowry, back in the day, come over in a baseball cap, T-shirt, and torn jeans for hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July? People could double or triple themselves to become different in different situations, but somehow he thought the director probably had been solitary. And it was here, in her home, that the director, over time, against protocol, and in some cases illegally, had brought Area X evidence and files, erasing the divide between her personal and professional lives.

  Seen through the tunnel of the flashlight beam, the small living room soon gave up its secrets: a couch, three lounge chairs, a fireplace. What looked like a library lay beyond it, behind a dividing wall and through worn saloon-style doors. The kitchen was to the left and then a hallway; a massive refrigerator festooned with magnet-fixed photos and old calendars guarded the corner. To the right of the living room was a door leading to the garage, and beyond that probably the master bedroom. The entire house was about 1,700 square feet.

  Why had the director lived here? With her pay grade, she could have done much better; Grace and Cheney both lived in Hedley in upper-middle-class subdivisions. Perhaps there was debt he didn’t know about. He needed better intel. Somehow the lack of information about the director seemed connected to her clandestine trip across the border, her ability to keep her position for so long.

  No one had lived here for over a year. No one except Central had come in. No one was here now. And yet the emptiness made him uneasy. His breath came shallow, his heartbeat elevated. Perhaps it was just the reliance on the flashlight, the unsettling way it reduced anything not under its bright gaze to a pack of shadows. Maybe it was some part of him acknowledging that this was as close to a field assignment as he’d had in years.

  A half-empty water glass stood by the sink, reflecting his light as a circle of fire. A few dishes lay in the sink, along with forks and knives. The director had left this clutter the day she’d gotten in her car and driven to the Southern Reach to lead the twelfth expedition. Central apparently had not been instructed to clean up after the director—nor after themselves. The living-room carpet showed signs of boot prints as well as tracked-in leaves and dirt. It was like a diorama from a museum devoted to the secret history of the Southern Reach.

  Grace might have had Central come here and retrieve anything classified, but in terms of the director’s property theirs had been a light touch. Nothing looked disturbed even though Control knew they had removed five or six boxes of material. It just looked cluttered, which was no doubt the way they’d found it, if the office he’d inherited was any indication. Paintings and prints covered the walls above a few crowded CD stands, a dusty flat-screen television, and a cheap-looking stereo system on which had been stacked dozens of rare old-timey records. None of the paintings or photographs seemed personal in nature.

  An elegant gold-and-blue couch stood against the wall dividing the living room from the library, a pile of magazines taking up one cushion, while the antique rosewood coffee table in front of the couch looked as if it had been requisitioned as another desk: books and magazines covered its entire surface—same as the beautifully refinished kitchen table to the left. Had she done most of her work in these rooms? It was homier than he’d thought it would be, with good furniture, and he couldn’t quite figure out why that bothered him. Did it come with the house, or was it an inheritance? Did she have a connection to Bleakersville? A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.

  He walked through the hallway beside the kitchen, encountered another fact that seemed odd for no particular reason. Every door had been closed. He had to keep opening them as if going through a series of air locks. Each time, even though there was no prickle of threat, Control prepared to jump back. He discovered an office, a room with some filing cabinets and an exercise bike and free weights, and a guest bedroom with a bathroom opposite it. There were a lot of doors for such a small house, as if the director or Central had been trying to contain something, or almost as if he were traveling between different compartments of the director’s brain. Any and all of these thoughts spooked him, and after the third door, he just said the hell with it and entered each with a hand on Grandpa in its holster.

  He circled around into the library area and looked out one of the front windows. Saw a branch-strewn overgrown lawn, a battered green mailbox at the end of a cement walkway, and nothing suspicious. No one lurking in a black sedan with tinted windows, for example.

  Then back through the living room, through the other hallway, past the garage door, and into the master bedroom on the left.

  At first, he thought the bedroom had been flooded and all of the furniture had washed up against the nearest walls. Chairs were stacked atop the dressers and armoire. The bed had come to rest against the dressers. About seven pairs of shoes—from heels to trainers—had been tossed as flotsam on top of the bed. The covers were pulled up, but sloppily. On the far side of the room, in the flashlight’s gleam, a mirror shone crazily from beyond a bathroom door.

  He took out Grandpa, released the safety, aimed wherever his flashlight roved. From the dressers now over the bed, now to the wall against which the bed had previously rested, which was covered in thick purple curtains. Cautious, he pulled them back, revealing all-too-familiar words beneath a high horizontal window that let in a stagnant light.

  Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.

  Written in thick dark marker, the same wall of text, with the same map beside it that he had painted over in his office. As if the moment he had rid himself of it, it had appeared in the director’s bedroom. Irrational sight. Irrational thought. Now a hundred Controls were running from the room and back to the car in a hundred pocket universes.

  But it had been here for a while. It had to have been. Sloppy of Grace’s people not to remove it. Too sloppy.

  He turned toward the bathroom. “If anyone’s there, come out,” he said. “I have a gun.” Now his heart was beating so fast and his hand was so tight on the flashlight he didn’t think it could be pried loose.

  But no one came out.

  No one was there, as he confirmed by forcing himself to breathe more slowly. By forcing himself to check every corner, including a small closet that seemed more cavernous the farther he progressed into it. In the bathroom, he found the usual things—shampoo, soap, a prescription for blood pressure drugs, a few magazines. Brown hair dye and a hairbrush with gray strands snarled in it. So the director had felt self-conscious about reaching middle age. The brush gleamed when his flashlight struck it, seemed to want to communicate, akin to the scribbled-on receipts and torn magazine pages that had laid bare parts of her life to him, more meaningful to him than his own.

  He returned to the bedroom and played the flashlight beam over the wall again. No, not the exact same tableau. The same words, the exact same words. But no height marks. And the map—it was different, too. This version showed the island and its ruined lighth
ouse, along with the topographical anomaly and the lighthouse on the coast. This version also showed the Southern Reach. A line had been drawn between the ruined and functional lighthouses and the topographical anomaly. That line had then been extended to the Southern Reach. They looked very much like outposts on a border, like on ancient maps of empires.

  Control backed away and then down the hall into the living room, feeling cold, feeling distant. He could not think of a scenario in which Central had seen those words, that map, and not removed it.

  Which meant that it had been created after they had searched the house. Which meant … which probably meant …

  He didn’t allow himself the thought. Instead, he went to the front door to confirm a sudden suspicion.

  The knob turned easily in his hand. Unlocked.

  Which meant nothing.

  Yet now his foremost idea, his only real idea, was to get out of the house. But he still had the presence of mind to lock the front door and return to the back.

  Pushed open the French doors, out into the rain.

  Walked-ran back to the car.

  Not until he was parked well away, on Bleakersville’s main street, did he call his mother, tell her what he had found, and ask her to send a team in to investigate. If he’d done it from the site, they’d have kept him there for far too long. As they talked, Control tried to convince himself of benign interpretations, almost as much as his mother did. “Don’t make leaps, John, and don’t tell Grace because she’ll overreact,” which was correct. Anyone from the Southern Reach could have drawn that on the wall—Whitby as prime suspect other than the former director. Pushing against that relative comfort: A disturbing vision of the director wandering through neighborhoods and parks, across fields, into forests. Revisiting old haunts.

  “But, John, there is something I need to tell you.”

  “Tell me, then.” Had she given up Lowry’s identity as the Voice so she could hide something else?

  “You know the places where we picked up the anthropologist and the surveyor?”

  “A front porch, the back of a medical practice.”

  “We’ve noticed some … inconsistencies in those places. The readings are different.”

  “How? How are they different?”

  “We’re still sorting through the data, but we’ve quarantined the areas, even though it’s difficult.”

  “But not in the empty lot? Not where the biologist was?”

  “No.”

  022: Gambit

  Late morning. An attempt to regain … control. The old familiar debriefing room whose deficiencies he had become oblivious to, expecting a call from his mother with a report about the director’s house that couldn’t possibly come until hours from now.

  He had told Grace he was about to interview the biologist and wanted her there, in the room, this time. A few minutes later, Grace came in wearing a bright yellow dress in a flower pattern, black belt at the waist—some kind of Sunday best—not peering around the doorway, not looking like he might lob a grenade at her. He was immediately suspicious.

  “Where’s the biologist?” Grace asked, in a kind of conspiratorial way. Control was sitting by himself.

  Control pushed out the chair opposite with his foot by way of reply, pretending to busy himself looking over some notes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You just missed the biologist. But she had some very interesting things to say. Do you want to know what she said about you, for example?”

  Somehow Control had expected Grace would see it as a trap, get up and try to leave, and he’d have to convince her to stay. But she remained sitting there, appraising him.

  “Before I tell you, you should know that all recording devices have been turned off. This is just between the two of us.”

  Grace folded her arms. “That is fine with me. Continue.”

  Control felt wrong-footed. He had expected she would go check, make sure he wasn’t lying. Maybe she had checked before coming into the room. Grandpa Jack’s advice had been that for this kind of work you needed “a second guy, always.” Well, he didn’t have a second guy or gal. He plunged on anyway.

  “Let me get to the point. Before the final eleventh expedition, the director crossed over the border secretly, by herself. Did you know about this in advance? And did you provide material aid? Did you provide command-and-control decision-making? Were you, in fact, complicit in making sure she got back across the border? Because this is what the biologist says the director told her.” None of this was in the official report on the incident, which the Voice had sent via e-mail before their abrupt leave-taking over the phone. There, in the report, the director had claimed to have acted on her own.

  “Interesting. What else did the biologist tell you?” No heat behind the words.

  “That the director gave you instructions to wait at the border every night for a week on very specific dates about three weeks after she snuck across. To help her with her return.” According to security records, each of those days Grace had left the Southern Reach early, although there was no record of her at the border checkpoints.

  “This is all in the past,” Grace said. “What are you trying to prove? Exactly.”

  Control had begun to feel like a chess player who thinks he has a great move, but the opponent is either brilliant or bluffing or has something untouchable four moves ahead.

  “Really? That’s your reaction? Because both of those accusations would be enough to file an addendum to the report with Central. That you colluded with the director to violate regulations and security protocols. That you provided material support. She was put on probation. What do you think you’d get for lying?”

  Smiling, Grace asked, “What do you want?”

  Not exactly an admission, but it allowed him to continue on with the script in his head, muffled the alarm bells. “Not what you think, Grace. I’m not pushing for you to resign, and I don’t want to report this information to Central. I’m not out to get the director. I want to understand her, that’s all. She went over the border. I need to know exactly why and how, and what she found. The report on file is vague.” Wondered now if Grace had written the report, or overseen its writing.

  The report had mostly focused on the director’s punishment and the steps taken to once again tighten border security. There was a brief statement from the director that appeared to have been written by a lawyer: “Although I meant to act in the best interests of the Southern Reach and the requirements of my position, I deeply apologize for my actions and recognize that they were reckless, endangering, and not in keeping with the agency’s mission statement. If allowed to return, I will endeavor to adhere to the standard of conduct expected of me, and of this position.” “Measurements and samples” were also mentioned in the report, but Control had as yet been unable to track them down. They had not been placed in the storage cathedral, that much he knew. Unless that boiled down to a plant and a mouse and an old cell phone.

  “The director did not share her every thought with me,” Grace said in an irritated tone, as if this fact bothered her, but with a strange half-smile on her face.

  “I find it hard to believe that you don’t know more than you’re telling me.”

  This did not move Grace to respond, so he prodded her with “I’m not here to destroy the director’s legacy, or yours. I brought you here not just because of what the biologist said but also because I think we could both have autonomy here. That we could run the agency in a way that means your position remains unchanged.” Because as far as he was concerned, the agency was fucked and he was now an undercover agent in the field, entering hostile territory. So use whatever you don’t care about as a bargaining chip. Maybe before he found a way out he’d even give Whitby that transfer he’d once wanted. Maybe he’d return to Central and have a beer with Lowry.

  “How gracious of you,” Grace said. “The schoolboy is offering to share the power with the teacher.”

  “That’s not the analogy I would have
made. I would have—”

  “Anything the director did, she did because she believed it was important.”

  “Yes, but what did she do? What was she up to?”

  “Up to?” Grace said, with a little snort of disbelief.

  He chose his words very carefully. “Grace, I am already here. I am already in the middle of this. You should just tell me what’s going on.” What was the look that could convey without the reinforcement of words that he had already seen some very strange shit? “Remember, none of this is on the record.”

  Grace considered that for a second with what seemed like amusement. Then she began to talk.

  “You have to understand the director’s position,” Grace said. “The first expedition had set the tone within the organization. Even though the original director, by the time Cynthia got here, was trying to change that.” Cynthia? For a moment, Control wondered who Cynthia was because he’d thought of her as “the director” for so long. “The personnel here felt that the first expedition failed because the Southern Reach did not know what it was doing. That we had sent them in, and they had died because we did not know what we were doing, and we could never really make up for that.” The first expedition: a sacrifice to a lack of context. A lament unrecognized as such until it was too late. “And Lowry’s presence here at the agency”—was she reading his mind, did she somehow know?—“from my understanding, only made that worse. He was a living ghost, a reminder held up as a hero when he had just been a survivor. So his advice was given more weight, even when it was wrong. The director only really had a chance to pursue her own agenda after Lowry had been promoted to Central, even though that, too, was a problem. Lowry pushed for more expeditions even though the director wanted fewer, and whereas before she could control Lowry, now he was beyond her control. So we kept sending people in, throwing them up against a complete unknown. This did not sit well with the director, although she followed orders because she had to.”